There does seem to be a large sentiment that Themes should be accessible. The revamp seems to have gone a long ways to making it more flexible and optional for champs. However, that means that those that want to easily setup a deck with a theme in mind has to work harder in setting it up. Particularly since that theme if in the upgrade slot needs to ensure they have enough ranking to even choose it. So what I would like to ask for from DOG, is a deck building component (perhaps make it seperate from the current has the functionality will be different) that allows you to choose a thematic ability, it will then prompt you for the champions that have it on base and that you own, as well as those that have it on upgrade that have the stats to support it as well as having the upgrade selected. As a part of the information, it should also show you which champions have the stats, but not the chosen upgrade (in case you need one that you hadn't set up that way before) and those that do not have the stats so you know where to apply tokens too. This would allow you to quickly populate your deck with the champions you need for most, if not all, of your thematic elements. Without having to spend an hour flipping through your many champions to see which ones have the ability you need to make it happen. Personally I think the ability to select an ability and quickly view champions/etc that have said ability would be very helpful in building/maintaining decks. However, basing this request on the themes should help make it more of a priority to implement as themes seem to be a beloved part of the game deck designs. But in the NUX conversation it would certainly make it easier for players to build their decks. What do you guys think?
I think people just need to move away from mono race = theme and look and work to build races/classes into flavors for how they fit into more general themes. IF a class or race follow a similar design style or philosophy they will naturally have synergies together but also with the less restrictive themes. Barbarians can bring a lot to say equipment or phalanx style bgs, and drunks can bring a nice slant as a sub theme to equipment and so on.
From the interview, even Gedden loves using PoxBase and that XML parser that is used to glean out abilities is a great one. One of the things that I loved about PoxPulse, even though it has been outdated forever, was the option to view *all* of the abilities and then go through it instead of having to search for an ability as if we already knew what the abilities were. I don't know if it would be possible though it has often been requested from the Greens to try to keep an updated Abilities List (which could be relatively possible from the XML parser) and conditions list (Which baffles me since I do not believe it is easily parsed from the XML) and this has been a regularly requested item. In general, Deck Building is difficult. It's often considered to be the highest skill in the game, just like many other card games. Even in MtG - Deck Building is a huge thing. The problem is, however, that everything got shaken up and instead of how it was at launch with a few hundred cards that we would need to browse through to try to make a combination, we have to browse through 1300 runes, (or really, 200-300 or so runes if we wanted to really divide it up by faction) to try to search through and find a combination/deck that we would think is powerful. It's a lot of work, a lot of reading, that perhaps people just don't want to do.
Unfortunately conditions can't be sent through the feed because they don't have a data representation (I have not accessed the latest feed, so this may have changed). They are hard coded objects. I tried a couple of times to write an object/xml parser that would dump a concise structure for abilities/conditions/etc. However, the deviations tended to make it more work than seemed necessary. To your point though KTCAOP, Deck building should be a science or at least an artistry. The knowledge of how stuff interacts should be the difficult part, not the actual assignment of runes to a deck. My suggestion harkens back to a request awhile back to have deck assignments visible on champions, just with more expanded capabilities. Just trying to come up with an easier way for people to play while they work on re-memorizing 1300 runes and their configurations.
