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 What is Shards of War? Shards of War is a MOBA. Teams of 5v5 travelling down 3 lanes to bop each other, each lane has a set of towers and you win by destroying your opponent's HQ. You know the drill by now! Much like Heroes of the Storm, Shards of War works on a team level rather than individual character levels, so one amazing player on your team will boost everyone! Why should I play Shards of War instead of other MOBAs? Personally speaking, what puts me off all the other big MOBAs is the click-to-move controls. Shards of War is instead controlled by WASD (or arrow keys if you’re a filthy leftie like me) which some of us find a lot more intuitive to use. It effectively controls like a mouse and keyboard equivalent of a twin-stick shooter. On top of that, matches tend to be shorter than in DOTA 2 or League of Legends, usually at around 20-30 minutes unless things are really going down to the wire. But for me the answer is simply this: I think it’s a lot more fun than any of the others I’ve tried playing and is the only one I keep coming back to. So the “wasd” in the title wasn’t a typo? No, it was not. I want to be a sassy robot, can I be a sassy robot? You can be anything you want to be. And by that I mean you can be one of (at time of posting) 25 characters, called Sentinels. They’re generally split up into three categories - Attack, Tank and Support. Attack Sentinels do the bulk of the damage, Tanks are sponges who soak up a lot of hits and Support Sentinels restore health or apply status effects on teammates or opponents. Of course, things are a little more fluid than that and some attack Sentinels can slow and silence opponents, etc. Attack               Tank        Support     I’ll be totally honest and say I haven’t been playing long enough to really recommend specific strategies for any character, but the game is pretty simple to pick up so just pick anyone you like the look of and give them a whirl. I can only pick half a dozen of these guys, what gives? The free-to-play model works the same as League of Legends, where you are given a weekly rotation of free Sentinels and need to pay for in-game currency for the rest. Silver is used to buy Sentinels and can be earned for free by playing the game, Gold is used to buy Sentinels, Skins and a premium membership. When you’re first starting out you can get your first 10k Silver (enough to buy an average Sentinel) pretty quickly, so you can pick one character to stick to if you like them a lot. Older Sentinels can be as low as 5k Silver so really don’t take long to buy at all if you like them. At the time of posting, there’s two really good 95% off deals (bringing them down to a couple of bucks each) on starter packs called “Advanced/Ultimate First Strike Bundle” going that each give you 5 Sentinels, some skin vouchers, a week of Premium and a War Chest which gives you materials for upgrades. I didn’t really need these when I bought them since I tend to stick mostly to playing Valkyrie or occasionally Calibre, but I wanted to support the developers so bought them anyway. Upgrades? Rather than buying items from a shop as the game progresses like in DOTA, you set your Loadout before beginning the match. These are fixed items that with unlock as your team level increases. For each loadout tier, you can assign up to 3 items to select from when your team reaches that level. That selection is locked in for the rest of the match. These tend to be generic effects such as “your base attacks do splash damage to nearby opponents” but you can also unlock upgrades that are Sentinel specific and usually tend to be better than the generic ones. In your down-time between matches, you can spend resources (from War Chests, given at the end of games or purchased with Gold) plus a little bit of Silver to upgrade these loadouts, giving slight increases to their effects. It’s usually very minor, such as a 10% damage buff becoming an 11% damage buff on upgrade, so it’s not a pay-to-win mechanic - especially since with any amount of game time you will be upgrading these without using real money anyway. Will I be seeing the same map over and over again? Sort of. There’s two maps in Shards of War. “Empire City” and “Meridian Gate”. Both of these are 5v5 with 3 lanes but are differently laid out and include secondary objectives to help you overwhelm your opponent.   In Empire City there is a walking tank (called the D.R.A.G.O.N.) at the top of the map that, if defeated, will charge down the center lane from your HQ destroying everything in its path and is a great way to place pressure on the opposing team. Usually the best time to go for this is after a successful team battle where you are unlikely to be harassed while taking it down.   Meridian Gate has changed recently. Originally, you had to destroy 3 battery drones which spawned every couple of minutes to gain access to a mech suit for one of your team to control. Now, you just need to destroy one of two mechs placed in the center of the map to gain access to an AI controlled mech, not too dissimilar to the Dragon. I don’t know what anybody is saying! A large portion of the current player base is Russian and Turkish, so I’m as confused as you. The game hasn’t officially “launched” in North America yet as they haven’t done much of a marketing push outside of Europe but I believe that’s something that they’re looking into. I can’t really comment on American ping times to their servers, but from Ireland everything runs just fine. Screenshots For reference, I don’t use the default controls. My abilities 3, 4 and Ultimate are usually keyboard commands.      Well then, let’s play! I’m playing under the username Vyzendir but don’t really have a set schedule of when I’m online. If there’s anybody interested, I’d happily try setting up a clan for Goons to play together. I have a friend invite link which would get me a free skin if 3 people play to level 15 using it, but don’t feel obliged to use it when signing up! INVITE
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Mar 1, 2016 11:22
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 19:53 |
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