Not So Massively: An amazing revamp for LoL’s Poppy (November 30, 2015)

Online gaming and e-sports are getting bigger by the day, and there are literally hundreds of popular online games out there that don’t really fit into the MMO category. Join me each week for Not So Massively, where I gather together the top stories from the biggest MOBAs, competitive card games, first person shooters, and other popular online games in one place.

League of Legends gave old champion Poppy a whole new set of amazing abilities this week that are sure to make for some fantastic replay moments. Path of Exile revealed a new skill that may give oldschool Diablo II players a touch of nostalgia. Star Citizen is extremely close to hitting the $100,000,000 mark thanks to its anniversary sale. Hearthstone revealed how ordinary players can work their way into its million-dollar 2016 world championship. Destiny will be getting an interesting new Challenge mode for raids, Dungeon Defenders II is getting a full server wipe on PS4 in just a few days, and Heroes of the Storm released its new Towers of Doom game battleground. We also heard the latest news from Chronicle: RuneScape Legends, Splatoon, Lord of Vermillion Arena, and Elite: Dangerous.

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Patch 5.23 has now landed in League of Legends, bringing some pretty big balance changes to champions, items, turrets, jungles, and death timers. Riot Games has also suggested that we can expect the next few patches to be pretty big in terms of balance changes as they’re still now sure where the meta will go after the pre-season changes. Players who have complained about the disparity in model sizes between different champions will be pleased to know that Riot has now done a pass through all of them and re-sized many champions. These changes in size will not affect the champions’ hitboxes, and should make the model more accurately representative of the actual hitbox.

Fans of classic 2010 champion Poppy will be happy to know that she’s getting a total revamp right now on the public test server. Poppy has been reimagined as a disruptive tank who can take a beating and control the field of battle. Poppy now has a shield ability that grants passive armour and magic resistance and can be activated to create an aura that blocks enemy dashes. Her passive also now periodically throws her buckler as a basic attack, which bounces off the enemy and grants a shield if she picks it up again. Her ultimate ability is a charge-up attack that makes a giant hammer literally knock enemies across the map and is sure to inspire more than a few replay videos. This week also saw the official release of Illaoi, the Kraken Priestess.

Do you remember the fun of being a whirling vortex of ethereal death as a hammerdin in Diablo II? Path of Exile is channeling its inner hammerdin this week with the announcement of a new Blade Vortex skill coming as one of the new physical spells in Content Update 2.1.0. The spell deals physical damage to enemies in close proximity, with both the damage and area of effect increasing with gem level. It was originally developed as a physical blade that moved around the caster just like D2‘s Blessed Hammer, but developers found it more reliable as an area-effect. Multiple casts will add more blades to your whirling green vortex of death, and the Increased Duration support gem will make them last longer.

Star Citizen is fast-approaching the $100 million crowdfunding mark after its aggressive anniversary sale on ships pushed total sales up to $98.6 million from over 1,057,000 registered accounts.

Around 50,000 more testers were added to the public test of the huge Alpha 2.0 update, which adds a small zone players can warp around with several space stations to dock at and missions to complete. Developers are currently focused on improving server stability and working through all the crash reports coming from testers.

Have you beaten the King’s Fall raid in Destiny so many times that there’s no longer any challenge in it? Bungie released details this week of a new challenge mode feature coming to the King’s Fall raid in early December, but it’s not just a harder version of the existing raid. Instead, each week one of the bosses will have a challenge mode active that asks you to defeat them in a very specific manner or with a specific restriction. Challenge modes work in both normal and hard mode and will come with special rewards.

Dungeon Defenders II revealed plans to release its new Loot & Survive patch on Playstation 4 on December 1st. Players should be aware that this will also come with a full server wipe, so your current heroes, items and progress will be reset. All microtransaction purchases you’ve made will be automatically refunded as gems to spend in the cash shop in the future, and your Wyvern Tokens will be replaced with gems (including those you’ve already spent). Players will also be getting a number of exclusive items for participating in the PS4 test.

Blizzard has announced the rules for the 2016 Hearthstone Championship Tour that will lead up to the 2016 World Championship event. Players can earn points toward securing a place in the world championship by playing ranked mode or winning Hearthstone Major tournaments or online Hearthstone Cups. The top 100 players in the ranked mode leaderboards at the end of each season will win between 5 and 15 points, and the top 128 in each region will be invited to the Season Preliminaries. Eight players who do well in these throughout the year will be hand-picked to enter the Last Call Invitational tournament in the hopes of securing a spot in the world championship.

This year’s competitive season sees a number of differences, most notably a significant increase in prize money. The seasonal tournaments will have $100,000 to give away, while the world championship will have a total prize pool of $1,000,000 up for grabs. Players who have been hand-picked and invited to the world championship will also no longer be able to automatically advance to later rounds so that the tournament is fair.

Heroes of the Storm‘s Towers of Doom battleground is now live and has been added to the map rotation. Towers of Doom is a large three-lane battleground that emphasises strategy heavily, as players can only damage the enemy core by capturing bell towers. Each team starts the map with three towers and destroying an enemy’s tower makes it respawn for your own team.

Altars will spawn periodically throughout the game in locations randomly selected from four potential altar sites, and that’s when both teams will want to get to it as quickly as possible. Capturing the altar will cause all towers under your control to launch projectiles at the enemy’s core, and the game ends once 40 projectiles have hit one team’s core. Check out the overview video below for more details on mercenaries, boss battles, and other interesting mechanics on this map.

• Lord of Vermilion Arena has received an update, adding characters from Ragnarok Online and animes like Rozen Maiden.
• Online card game Chronicle: RuneScape Legends is now in closed beta.
• Splatoon added the hilarious new Sloshing Machine weapon, which is pretty much a washing machine themed grenade launcher.
• David Braben released a new video of landing on planets in Elite: Dangerous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyPoaVRErE0