slightly off topic?

It seems like lately it's been all doom and gloom around here. Unanswered questions, confusion, disdain. So instead of focusing on the fate of warcraft miniatures, I was wondering what got everyone into it. Did you play the MMO? The TCG? Just pick it up because you thaught it looked cool?

I probably started because of the MMO as I have never played another miniatures game. I played the TCG for a while, but after trying minis, I decided they would be my latest money pit lol. I unfortunately started too late, and by the time I had a decent enough collection to build some ok teams, my local battleground was gone and i'm stuck here waiting like everyone else.


My next question, for those of you still reading this, is if you think the classes and how they impact each other are accurately portrayed in the miniatures game. I played a rogue in the MMO from the time AQ 40 opened up until a few months before WotLK launched. I kinda feel like stealthers got shafted in minis, but if it were any other way full stealth teams would make the game broken, as they would be untargetable while stealthed and such.


Anyway i'm just kind of rambling on, hoping to generate some responses, because these forums have become quite lonely lately.

I have never played the MMO for even one second. I picked up Minis because I wanted a cool game that I thought I could enjoy playing by myself, sorta like an rpg board game. But I quickly got into playing with others in BGs at my local store and playing Minis on VASSAL all the time. It was really fun. In my whole time playing Minis, I only bought one deluxe set and three boosters ever. I bought a lot of singles and trade for others.

From what I've heard and read, the classes that got the worst end of the deal where the rogues, since they rely on stealth and there is no way to stealth them. Hunters also got shafted on their traps apparently. And priests seems to be significantly more worse off in Minis than in the MMO.

Clearly, the dominant class in Minis is the warlock, followed by the shaman. Some druids seem pretty powerful, and when the right druid is coupled with the right 'lock and/or shaman, the game quickly become markedly unbalanced. Monsters in general were never very good except for few here and there, like Arugal, Vashj, EFS, Hellcaller, and Rethilgore.

Oh well....my 2 cents worth...

Very interesting. I always figured you played the MMO because of your undying allegiance to the horde. Now that you mention the hunter trap thing, that would make for some nightmare matches. Imagine distracting shot someone into a trap...

I bet traps could've been useful and not overpowered.

As for shamans being 2nd most powerful, I don't really think so. It's difficult talking about it, because some classes only have one or two characters that are really awesomely tournament worth, but it means that the class is actually useful.

I'd try to rank them by how many characters in each class are tournament worthy or nearly probably tournament worthy. This is the order I'd put them in. Obviously it is biased. You saw Cairne in tournies, but I don't really think he ever truly deserved a spot in them, for example.

Warlocks: tons of them like Morts, Kiala, daxin, hellcaller, Elizabetha, ryno, marlowe

mages: jaina, irana, jezbella, wavecaller, morganis

shamans: vashj, velen, haruka

paladins: savin, crappus

hunters: kaustron, elana

druids: morova, thangal, vi'gor

classless: kitty cat, rethilgore, EFS

rogues: zomm, dralor

warriors: amalar (post-buff ...), parvink, maybe wilton

priests: sad panda

And I've been playing Heroes of Gaia, a fun online chinese rip-off of Heroes of Might and Magic. Horribly buggy, but I enjoy it anyway.

I like your breakdown of most useful characters by class. I haven't really found a new game yet. Messing around with the tcg a bit. Haven't seen a lot of the newer cards yet though. Starting up on some repaints to pass some time when I have it. Finally playing through the frozen throne to get my strategy fix lol.

CorayThan gave you a good list of the useful character per class at the highest levels of tournament play.

There were a lot of tier 2 characters that would have been good enough to play given a bit more support, but after 8+months of not getting a new set it starts being hard to imagine any of these characters as having been on the verge of playable.

At our store however we had a meta game going on with people trying to make points via Accomplishments, and we were forced to use a lot of these tier 2 characters so I know a few of them were just on the verge. Namrah as a priest was pretty strong, enough so that she was a big center piece of my 5 v 5 team (in 3 v 3 she had to be passed for stronger options). Nathressa teams were also decent, in particular I think they would have had a better finish in Houston if more people had shown up. I had a Nath x2 + Dralor team that just ninja'd the opponent to death with Sap + Expose Armor.

The only problem I can see is they tried too much to follow the MMO. It ended up so that Warlocks were pretty much superior to any other clothies because they combined high range, auto-damage, the best Resist per Honor point and ridiculous Health levels in one package (Mortimer would have been good on 7 Honor, he was insane on 6). Priests had ridiculously bad range with low defenses and Health which made them awful, and Healing powers were not pushed enough to compensate (to be fair, if Priests had healing that was worth their bad stat, games would start to last 2 hours as soon as the first turtle teams showed up). The only good priests ended up being Shadow priests because of that (with Shadow Form they could be only slightly-bad mages at least, and get some incidental healing in exchange, like Namrah did).

I'm not exactly sure how to define a tier 2 character, but if you eliminate all legendary characters and all 8 honor characters the strategy element of the game really starts to shine through IMO. Because once you get that low in the brackets there are only a few characters that are really a bargain at their honor cost I.E. Morts, phadulas, everyone knows who i'm talking about. But anyway, once you get into lower honor matchups, it starts getting away from the characters themselves and starts moving strongly towards the importance of ABC's and how/when you use them. I think it makes for more fun in the match. I think the same can be said for themed teams. While the lose some matches it is really fun to make your opponent squirm by exploiting racial passive abilities.

So if someone could define tier 2 minis to me that would be excellent. Thanks for your posts!

On the topic of shadow priests...

It would have been great if they incorporated added range to shadow attacks while in shadow form. In the MMO, the ahdow talent tree allowed you to increase your armor, attack damage, and allowed you to put talent points into increasing range.

That alone could have made shadow priests more viable for competitive play. Of course that's purely speculation on my part.