 What's up everybody, I'm TheMangoose, you were awesome and today I want to clear up some confusion about energy damage vs physical damage in Legacy Paragon. Now why the hell would I talk about the mechanics of a long gone map from a dead game? Well, because Metabuff has clearly stated in their frequently asked questions that they will realize the difference between energy and physical damage. I've been talking to quite a few people, as I do, and no one seems to remember or understand what this means. So I'm going to break this shit down Barney style and walk you through some of the upsides and downsides of this particular mechanic. Before we begin, let me just say right off the top, the main misconception with physical vs energy is that physical equals basic attack damage while energy equals ability damage. This is not the case. So what the hell do they mean by physical vs energy damage? Well think of it as each hero has an alignment for one or the other and the only damage they deal is in accordance with their alignment. This includes both their abilities and basic attack damage. Two good heroes we can use as an example are Gideon and Countess. Gideon is an energy damage hero while Countess is physical. Gideon deals energy damage so his basic attacks and abilities deal energy damage. I know a giant rock smashing you in the head really seems like it would be like about the most physical thing possible, but for the purposes of the game it dealt energy damage and could only be negated by energy armor. This on the other hand was built as the first physical caster. Focus on buying cards that increase your physical damage and mana. Both her basic attacks and abilities dealt physical damage. Again, I know a wave of magical energy conjured from her blades may seem like it should be classified as energy, but once again for the purposes of this game mechanic it was physical damage and could only be negated by physical armor. So what did that mean for cards? What about the cards that increased basic attack damage and others that increased ability damage? They just didn't exist. There were however cards that increased her energy damage and others that increased her physical damage. Energy heroes could increase their ability damage by buying energy damage cards. ADCs could still choose cards to increase their attack speed and crit, but they would want cards that also correlated with their damage type. A card that increased the energy damage and crit chance would be great for Murdoch and Energy ADC but would suck on Twinblast because he was a physical ADC. Now why would they ever implement this system? Because it was a good way to force meaningful decisions in the draft. If the enemy team picked all physical damage heroes then you could simply build physical armor and walk all over them. So it behooved you to pick a good balance when picking your team. If you're thinking of taking Calna's but your team picked Twinblast and Chimera, two sources of physical damage, then it would benefit you to choose a different caster instead. Then hopefully your team would also pick up either an energy based offline or support. This forced people to learn more than one hero for each role. If you were actually concerned about assisting your team you needed to learn both a physical and energy based option for each position. Why did Paragon do away with this system? For one, it confused people. It's not something normally done in Bobas so players that come from other games were used to a basic versus ability damage system and the energy versus physical thing threw them for a loop. It also confused new players that had never played this type of game before. People would kind of make up in their own heads what constituted a physical or energy attack and roll with that instead of checking the hero. For example, Sparrow was a physical damage hero. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. She shoots fucking arrows into your face hole. Seems pretty physical. However, as someone for the minions' comments mentioned, she's obviously conjuring these arrows out of thin airs instead of just like you know pulling from a quiver. So they must be magic and therefore must be energy based. That's something that never occurred to me but it does make sense in a weird way. If you were to think along those lines and build a bunch of energy damage for Sparrow, you wouldn't be doing jack shit in a match and that would just lead you to believe that Sparrow sucked. I mean it isn't always obvious. Halasur loads and shoots a physical rocket at you but he was an energy damage hero. Explosive energy and all that but damn it seemed kind of physical to me. Another reason it didn't work for Paragon was done away with is because all of your decks were pre-built. You couldn't include options in your deck to specifically deal with ADCs because you never knew what damage type the ADC could be. Core will of course get around this because they plan to have all item options available. Yes you'll still be able to have pre-built item sets but you can go off the beaten path if you need to. Now one of the other problems is that this led to the armor meta. At least in higher elos, even ADCs were building one if not two fully slotted armor cards for in-game. An entire hero's kit dealing one type of damage meant that you could completely nullify their effectiveness by building the proper armor cards. I know many people enjoyed the long games but made a profit shooting for 30-45 minute match times and history has shown that using the physical versus energy formula is a recipe for one and a half to two hour games. Although there are some downsides to doing physical versus energy, I liked it back then and I like the idea now. A much larger hero pool could help nullify some of the disadvantages. While made above will only have 15 heroes in the alpha, I imagine that they'll be able to pump them out comparatively quickly after that. And having all the items available will allow for counter play. I just hope they're braced for the insane reddit battles over what heroes should be physical and what heroes should be energy. Shibby's wolves are spirit wolves so they should deal energy damage. No I don't care what kind of wolf that is, it's still a fucking wolf and that's physical. People are going to totally lose their shit so have your popcorn ready, folks. I'm out of here. there. And man, gooooo!