Drop-in Heroes of the Storm is BACK this week! Join us on Thursday from 6-8 p.m. Pacific for fun and mayhem. Ping Liore#1422 on Battlenet for an invite.
The Puzzle and Dragons thread on the Something Awful forums currently has the subtitle of “Japan’s Other Whaling Problem”, and I must admit that the pun always cracks me up. (Sorry, whales.) Indeed, PAD has clearly been formulated by a team of evil scientists to part fools like me from their money, and no event gets people ready to spend like the semi-annual Players’ Choice Godfest.
Godfests improve your chances of beating RNG to obtain powerful new members for your battle team (think Pokemon), but usually they include a couple of great monsters, a bunch of pretty okay ones, and a lot of meeeeeeh. The Players’ Choice Godfest, however, is made up of the 30 monsters that players want the most as determined by popular vote. The odds are still stacked against you by deliberate design (like running a second “festival” at the same time — I’m looking at you, Gala of Tides), but a PCGF is generally party time for attentive PAD players.
As mentioned in my last post I’ve been pretty good in the latter half of 2015 with in-app purchases and free-to-play transactions, and I’ve been back into PAD in a big way, so I decided to throw more money than usual down the PCGF hole this past weekend.
I had 8 rolls (45 Magic Stones) saved up just from playing. I bought 6 more rolls (30 Stones) through in-app purchases, and spent some pre-existing Google Play credit to buy one more roll.
Total spent:
$23 real dollars
$5 of selling my personal shopping information to Google
Countless hours of my life
So how did I make out in my whaling? Actually fairly well! My list:
- Cao Cao – Great: Hey sweet, a solid damage-dealing sub (non-leader)
- Idunn&Idunna – Good: Eh, okay, maybe useful one day
- Lakshmi – Okay: Meh
- Liu Bei – Great: Score! A great sub and definitely in the current meta
- Susano – Great: Double score! Clearly fate is telling me to make a green team…
- Cao Cao – Good: Hmm, underwhelming the second time.
- Fire Wizard, Laila – Bad: Not only a duplicate, but also useless.
- Kagutsuchi – Okay: Never even heard of it
- Double-edged Blade Brave, Claymore – Bad: I hate you, Gala of Tides
- ForestBahn – Bad: Boooo, dragon
- Nameless Blade Brave, Masamune – Bad: Not a god, not very powerful
- Cinderella – Bad: Will sit in my Monster Box forever without use
- Incarnation of Kirin, Sakuya – Good: A duplicate for me, but a nice leader
- Venus – Bad: Who voted this god onto the list, anyway?!
- Light Kali – Great: Sweeeeeeeet, I don’t have the subs for an LKali team but nice to have on hand
Although I didn’t get either of the gods I was hoping for (Pandora and Bastet), I’m actually pretty pleased with the results of my whalin’. Yes, there was a lot of dross, but combined with what I already had in my Monster Box I was able to graduate from a mid-tier demon team to a more end-game team*.
Would I drop $30+ again on a Godfest? Not for another 9-12 months. Out of 15 rolls one was a silver, or less powerful, egg, 2 were duplicates, and 5 weren’t even Gods. I ended up with 2 monsters that I’m using immediately and 3 that I will likely use in the future.
* PAD Strategy for talk for fellow players: Until this PCGF I’ve been running Ronia with a King Baddie, Immortal Dragon, and a couple of levelled up element demons. Now my team is Verdandi, GZL (which I already had in my Monster Box), Lui Bei, Cao Cao, and a fully evo’ed Echidna. Eventually I should replace the Echidna with Susano I think, but for now I need the RCV boost. Now to skill up and evo everything!
