sealed/draft discussion

The scoreboard:

5-1 @Scarponi
4-2 @Jade303
2-4 @Squidy
1-5 @neoncat

The original thread. More details / analysis to come below.

 

My build:

Level 2 Dwarf Priest

Level 1 Human Wizard

Level 3 Dwarf Warrior

 

Thoughts and reflections:

- It's really hard to build a good wizard, and even harder to build a good priest because most arcane items / divine items are useless (especially the tokenless items you need to fill out a build).
- Warriors are easy, because just about any combination of weapons, armor, and boots will do just fine. Shields have a bit more variance, but are still more consistent than arcane and divine items.
- Racial skills can be clinchers if you get an awesome one.
- Class skills are pretty much all subpar. If you see something middling, use it.
- Terrain attachments are powerful, especially lava because it's so widely available.
- If you have anything with encumber/WWE/WoW/step attacks, use it.
- Don't use elves. You won't have the equipment they need to work properly.
- There's a lot of variance due to low-quality items. Sometimes you'll draw an awesome hand, sometimes you'll draw move cards for an entire match.

We all ended up with 1-2 legendary items and 12-15 epic, using ~1L and ~4E in our builds.

 

Where to go from here: I'm going to whip up a drafting manager this week, and see about another get-together next weekend, or maybe on a weekday evening. It'll probably be Rochester, since that's simplest.

 

If it's around the same time (19h GMT is even better) you can count me in. Was some nice fun

 

First, my thanks to @neoncat for initiating this, @Squidy for the idea, and @Jade303 as well for the games, it was a lot of fun!

My general thoughts going in were there wouldn't be a lot of decent step attacks, so movement would be at a premium, this also meant I valued Wizards more than normal. With the chests that we drew there was a lot of low end stuff, it was a question of how much better quality items could you put on a single team. Also to a great extent build synergy had to be thrown out the window, there just wasn't enough item choices to put together a team in that way.

Below is my build followed by a few more specific thoughts.

Zakdeb
Level 4 Dwarf Wizard

Charring Staff
Chillwood Staff
Cerulean Amulet
Scorching Wand
Cloudy Circlet
Wand Of Rapid Air
Tempest Robes
Possessed Shoes
Perfect Toughness
Apprentice Rifthopping
​

1 x Surging Bolt
1 x Chilling Rime
1 x Arcane Spray
1 x Shuffle
2 x Ember Burst
2 x Toughness
2 x Whirlwind Enemies
1 x Teleport Self
2 x Ember Spray
1 x Cautious Sneak
1 x Glob Of Flame
2 x Force Bolt
1 x Immovable
1 x Reflexive Teleport
2 x Wall Of Fire
1 x Resistant Hide
1 x Frost Jolt
1 x Dimensional Traveller
1 x Force Blast
1 x Perplexing Ray
1 x Bungled Bolt
1 x Cold Snap
1 x Fire Spray
2 x Mighty Spark
1 x Rusty Armor
2 x Flame Spit
2 x Whirlwind
​

Kotim
Level 1 Human Warrior

Warrior's Mace
Nifty Halberd
Maquah Of Ancient Blood
Reliable Scale Mail
Twisting Shield
Energetic Helmet
Kerrick's Steel Boots
Advanced Flexibility
Defensive Chopping
​

2 x Rushing Aura
1 x Strong Chop
3 x Weak Chop
3 x Hardy Mail
2 x Nimble Strike
2 x Pushback Parry
1 x Shuffle
1 x Slicer
1 x Parry
2 x Lunging Hack
1 x Slowed
2 x Leadership
2 x Mighty Bludgeon
2 x Reliable Mail
1 x Able Bludgeon
1 x Quick Reactions
1 x Ouch!
1 x Strong Bash
2 x Unnerving Strike
1 x Shield Block
1 x Trained Bludgeon
2 x Strong Hack
1 x Hard To Pin Down
​

Kuriwan
Level 1 Dwarf Wizard

Oak Staff
Overloaded Staff
Blister Stone
Rumbling Rod
Barnum's Burning Bauble
Chit Of Choking Smoke
Footfall Robes
Ulalia's Boots
Stout Charger
Novice Blazing
​

2 x Surging Blast
1 x Cautious Sneak
1 x Big Zap
1 x Fire Spray
1 x Flame Jet
1 x Kindler
1 x Charge
2 x Glob Of Flame
1 x Hot Spot
1 x Ember Spray
2 x Wall Of Fire
2 x Weak Strike
1 x Firestorm
1 x Obliterating Spark
1 x Force Blast
3 x Arcane Beam
1 x Trip
1 x Bungled Bolt
1 x Desperate Block
2 x Flanking Move
1 x Forgetfulness
1 x Mail
2 x Mighty Spark
2 x Smoke Bomb
1 x Arcane Aura
1 x Sparkling Cloth Armor
1 x Hit The Deck
​

I actually drew enough that I might have built a 1/1/1, but again, favoring wizards slightly I decided to leave off the priest. I had relatively speaking 4 very nice staffs, and so that was the clincher. The staffs ate up half my tokens though, and having no quality tokenless arcane items, I just tried to minimize weak cards after equiping what I liked. My warrior was really there more for protection and to soak up damage. I ended up with a token left over on him having only used 3 tokens on weapons. Next time I think I'd use the token on the Parrying Buckler which I also had rather than the Twisting Shield, but I initially was more worried about other wizards than melee attacks. With a fair amount of inconsistency in what I drew from one game to the next I can't say that any particular item was key. A number of them played key rolls in different matches, but it was very much just trying to optimize with what was in the hand at any particular time.

 

Hmm.. now what did I have? General Gideon's Helm, no decent human or elf skills... but using the following items, I had some very close (and fun!) games.

Dwarf Warrior
Gleaming Glaive
Flashing Longspear
Tango Spear I love you Tango Spear.
Parrying Buckler
Crusty Helm
Old Padded Mail
Diamond Moccasins
Novice Impaling
Untrained Stoutness

My warrior had four good weapons drop, the fourth being Burnished Blade. So I went with a stabbing strategy. It worked well enough, but trust me when I say a random item wizard is more dangerous than a random item warrior.

Dwarf Priest
Jaguar Mace
Heavy Mace
Backflip Buckler
Burnished Plates
Heavy Dashing Boots
Righteous Tome
Small Healing Orb
Charcoal Talisman
Untrained Piety
Stoutness

I regret not using my Rockshaft Atlatl after the first match when I switched it out for Heavy Mace. The Stone Feet probably would have helped against Scarponi/Squidy using WW against me. My divine item selection was terrible, but as it turns out fairly effective.
The VIP item here was Heavy Dashing Boots. Having Reliable Mail is good, having Dash on a dwarf ? Very good!

Dwarf Wizard
Staff Of Chask
Frosty Staff
Rod Of Palver Pree
Sky Locket
Chit Of Choking Smoke
Citrine Amulet
Phantom Cape
Goat Boots
Electroporter Initiate
Advanced Toughness

Lastly, my wizard. He has the advantage of both Encumber (which no one else had) and Punishing Bolts. He also has the disadvantage of not having Winds of War or any whirlwinds. The items I did have, I used. Smoke Bomb is a very versatile card, and Teleport Self was invaluable as well.

My feedback? There are few good tokenless items for Divine/Arcane Item slots, making it difficult to build a proper priest.
Overall it was fun, and surprising to see what my opponent's had in store. You really have to take your conception of proper, high-level MP play and throw it out the window. You just can't predict what they will do!

 

Hey guys, nice thread and feedback. Perhaps also schedule more drafting test runs ? I'm interested in knowing how many types of drafts the game can/should support. I'd love to observe (unfortunately, 6pm gmt is 2am 4me, yikes!) and if possible make suggestions for simple admin commands/pre-vis that can support draft tourneys until the devs find time to code a dedicated UI. A drafting manager is a great interim idea and make it freely available, woot !

What other types of drafts would you like ? We don't have booster packs but it wouldn't be too difficult to script an equivalent, maybe call them booster blocks? In future, the draft organizer can simply call the blocks for play. Eg: Winds of Change, Steps to Heaven, Roasted Scars, Buff Paradise ... and each block contains a predetermined set of items, there'd be more transparency. Using the test server and a neutral party, it shouldn't be too diffcult to create private chats for the drafting phase. Tots ?

 

As far as draft formats go, these might be interesting (I stole most of them):

individual - Player is presented N times with pick 1-of-3. Each set of 3 would have the same rarity.
champion - Player chooses 1 of 3 characters equipped entirely with Legendary / Epic / Rare equipment. Repeat thrice. Player may choose any 6 Uncommon / Common items to complete the entire build.
Rochester - A publicly-visible block of N items is generated, with a pre-determined spread of rarities. Players take one each in turn. Repeat (rotating the first position) until they each have a sufficient pool.
booster - A hidden block of N items is generated for each player. Players take one and the set is passed along. Repeat until each has a sufficient pool.
grid - A 3x3 grid of items is generated. In turn, players take all items in a row or column, which are then replaced randomly.
Winchester - There is a set of publicly-visible stacks, as many as there are players, each containing a single item to begin. The first player chooses a stack, and then a random item is added to each stack. The next player chooses, an additional item is added, etc...


I'm not sure that draft-specific console commands are useful yet, simply because of the variety of ways that a draft can be held. It would be most useful to have a multi-giveItem command, where you can just pass in any number of arguments instead of having to give each item seperately. At the moment, I've had to set up a console-text-entry bot that can automate that process based on a list of items.

 

Oh, for starters...I'm thinking a draft-bot for testing purposes so participants don't have to worry about too much setup.

The setup for individual, champion, grid formats feel long imo. As for the rest, I suppose either the wiki (with query commands) or a dedicated draft manager site could suffice. I have to think a little on the implementation...

 

Oh, is this a race now?

 

Nah, wiki is there...items and cards info all there. Draft games are account independent. I'd love to get an engine up and hooked in-game. All it really needs is someone to generate and maintain the item db, port into the in-game draftbot and viola!

everything sounds so easy on paper, hehe...

 

I'm thinking of maybe running a sealed deck tournament myself, where I would set up all the accounts and hand out the passwords when the event starts (hopefully I can nag BM into implementing my cheat disabler).

What did people think about the number and types of chests they were given? Need more?

 

I give you the individual draft - http://neoncat.x10.mx/draft/individual.php

That page will guide you through a pick 1-of-3 draft, where you choose 2L, 6E, 9R, 15U, 20C. Be warned that it's HARD. I haven't put much effort into on-the-fly analysis of your draft pool, so you have to rely on memory. Of course, that's what makes it fun.

Suggestions are welcome as always, but please playtest first.

There's a link from the draft page to a console data entry bot (written in Java). Pasted the output of the draft tool into the bot's data entry window, click the button, and then give focus to the CH console. (Have the console ready so you can just alt-tab and click. The bot will start dumping text after 5 seconds.)

 

What we used seemed to work good enough. I wouldn't want too much more as it would really lengthen build time.

 

This is really cool. If you could setup a private room for multiple participants to test the drafting engine with a shared item pool, we could get a better idea of how long it would take irl.

 

Unfortunately, my free hosting doesn't have the capacity for a push-notification system to link up clients, so I can only throw together single-client tools. I suppose I could hack together something with server polling, but I'll wait until there's a clear benefit over single-client drafting.

Except for booster draft (which has lots of hidden state), all of the draft formats I mentioned can be implemented on a single-client, with a single player communicating information and inputting choices. I'm probably going to poke at Winchester next, and then wait until we have more feedback before going further.

 

My bad, I misunderstood. I have that old fashion thinking that draft games are always shared pools. Just curious, question at the participants: Did opening owned chests with a clean account take away significant strategic decision making aspects compared to say, drafting over a shared pool ? Or was it make the best team and pray the others had no counter ?

 

Yeah, to a certain extent it's just a different strategy. They don't know what you have, and you don't know what to counter for. You're building blind against an unknown meta, instead of having seen the items out there that you might encounter. I think both are enjoyable in their own way.

 

Hey! don't ruin my reputation it was neoncat and mostly Scarponi who were running ww cards when I decided not to play mines. But ya I had some Winds of War :x

And mostly with more it would feel like a constructed format. The number of chests seemed good enough for me, but one time isn't enough testing.