Valve clarifies Artifact’s shopping system, reveals more reworks

Valve continued to show it means business with yet another blog post on Artifact. This week’s blog post started with further explanations of how the shop would work and with more details on reworks for some popular hero cards and items.

Though Valve talked thoroughly about the shop’s changes in last week’s blog post, it decided to go more into detail since the feedback it received from the community indicated the shop was a bit confusing.

Players were introduced to a new keyword, “Invest,” but it is now changed to “Earn” to indicate that the gold would be gained instantly. “Purchase” option was also renamed to “Shop” to simplify the UI and the reroll button was also removed in favor of immediately replacing purchased items with new ones, just like how it was in the original shop.

The developer was clear with its intentions to keep the magic of the Secret Shop within the game. Players will still be able to assemble their item decks before the game with a total of 10 cards. Once they get into a game, 11 random item cards will be added to their decks. Though the items will be random, they’ll follow a strict distribution. 

The 11 extra cards will feature four tier-one, three tier-two, two tier-three, one tier-four, and one tier-five item. 

The devs said players would see random tier-one cards if they were to run out of cards but the wording used makes it a bit confusing. Their statement could also be interpreted in a way that players could see random cards from the tier level of their shop. The latter has a chance of being too good to be true, though.

Item Reworks

Items have been an important part of Artifact’s core gameplay. This week, Phase Boots, Claszureme Hourglass, and Nyctasha’s Guard were in the scopes of the devs.

“You may have noticed how the rarity icons look different,” Valve said. “These icons represent the general order that cards can be unlocked instead of traditional card rarity.”

With the changes, players were now starting the game with the first tier of items unlocked alongside some items from the second tier of items. Overall, the change looks effective to separate early game items from the late game items. 

Phase Boots

Aside from stat and cost changes, Phase Boots now allow heroes to swap to another position instead of switching places with another unit. The change gives more options to players while playing and ensures variety.

Claszureme Hourglass

Claszureme Hourglass was one of the most annoying items in the game, according to Valve, solely due to its ability to minimize the playing space of players. The changes to the item allow it to keep its core while playing against it easier.

Nyctasha’s Guard

The original version of Nyctasha’s Guard was great for dealing a little bit of damage to the tower by throwing adjacent enemies to other lanes. It was almost impossible to play around it if you were going second in a lane, however. 

While the item still accomplishes the same goal with the new changes, the players should be able to play around it better.

Hero Reworks

Valve was clear that players would see drastic changes to heroes since the beginning of the reveal season. The reworks shared in today’s blog post ensured that their stats wouldn’t be the only thing about them that was subject to change.

Prellex

Now that the number of units a player can have in a lane is limited, it was only natural for Prellex to find herself a new purpose. Not to stray away from her core mechanics, the hero is now more about buffing the creeps than creating them.

Her reactive ability allows her to transform regular creeps into mega creeps and her signature card allows her to place auras that buff her trusty followers.

Axe

Axe was arguably one of the most powerful heroes in Artifact. The new changes shrank his size a bit but he was also accompanied by a new signature card.

Berserker’s Call is now an active ability and can be activated every two turns. While Axe will be able to chop off heads with Culling Blade which allows him to slay damaged enemy heroes that have three or less HP.

Ogre Magi

Ogre Magi RNG was one of the worst ways to lose a game. Multicasting a game-winning spell over and over again tilted agro players to their cores. 

Ogre Magi was also able to keep his core mechanic but without the element of luck. Multicast is now a reactive ability which allows players to repeat a blue spell or an enchantment they cast if Ogre Magi is present in that lane. A two-turn long cooldown was also added to keep it fair for players on the receiving end of Ogre Magi’s hammer.

The cards generated by Multicast get discarded at the end of the turn and don’t get modified in any way.

Ogre Magi now has two armor and four health as opposed to seven health and deals two damage instead of three. His signature card Ignite only received a mana cost increase by one and still deals one piercing damage to each enemy.

The important change here looks to be the keyword “Round Start” which makes it clear when the damage gets applied.

It looks like the changes in Artifact aim to reduce RNG and give players more options. Heroes are slowly moving away from just being bodies and stat monsters to having actual purposes. 

Items seem to follow the same path as well. In the original version, if you weren’t using a deck that had a way of generating gold, the items only meant more stats. But now it looks like items will have a bigger role to play in Artifact.

It’s still hard to say how these changes will affect the original gameplay since the game is still being developed behind closed doors without any rumored release dates.