Where is Sarkhan?

Plastic

Devs, why hasn't Sarkhan been in the vault yet? Back in August, when rotating planeswalkers started, this was posted:

Planeswalkers currently available in the Vault:
*Ob Nixilis, Reignited (Exits the Vault on August 25)
*Kiora, Master of the Depths (Exits the Vault on September 1)
*Koth of the Hammer (Exits the Vault on September 8)
*Gideon, Ally of Zendikar (Exits the Vault on September 15)

And as of right now, this is the information on the D3 site:

Ob Nixilis, Reignnited (Exits the Vault on October 20)
Ajani Vengeant (Exits the Vault on October 27)
Kiora, Master of the Depths (Exits the Vault on the November 3)
Jace, Unraveler of Secrets (Exits the Vault on November 10)


We're going through 2 rotations of Ob Nixilis (Reignited*) and Kiora already, but Sarkhan hasn't been there once. Please switch him with one of the PWs that are going to be coming up soon.

Thanks.

Edit: JC said a new one will rotate in every time one goes out Source

Hibernum_JC wrote:

...
For Planeswalkers, the plan is similar. We'll always keep the four basic ones (Chandra, Liliana, Jace and Gideon) and we'll rotate 4 others in and out. Every week, we'll rotate a Planeswalker out and rotate a new one in. This lets us, again, not overcrowd the Vault and make sure it's fully readable and accessible for players.
...

Where's Sarkhan?

Pestilence

I concur wholeheartedly.

shteev

Sarkhan, specifically, is the PW who first disappeared from the shop that we were all so annoyed about.... we didn't know he was coming back. We were reassured that he definitely would come back. We are no longer reassured.

Foznertep

This rotation is stupid, to put it bluntly. It is so frustrating to wait for a specific PW to enter and stare at a blank vault in the meantime. How "useful" the FAQ is that tells me which are in the vault at the moment doesn't have to be mentioned. Saves me a tap on the Planeswalkers tab in the vault. Hurray.

I don't get this system. Players who already have the Walkers see no difference and new players can't see what/who they might want to save up for. That takes away a huge incentive. Or like in my case, when you finally saved up the crystals only to see the purchase gone from the vault and not come back for ages.

Steeme

I feel like Sarkhan is my most versatile planeswalker. You don't need to run dragons in your deck (although it is very efficient in Quick Battle). His ability to draw a card for 3 loyalty and his modest mana gains across all colors makes him very flexible and quite useful for events and objectives.

I concur that everyone should get a shot at picking him up.

khurram

Oh i know where Sarkhan is...... chilling with my other planeswalers


But i agree, giving a schedule of which planeswalker will enter the vault makes more sense and will be reassuring for those who are missing those pws....

span_argoman

Increasing the number of planeswalkers in the Vault from 4 to 6 would help a lot with wait times imo.

shteev

Koth is back today I see.

Gideon

There is absolutely no reason all of the planeswalkers can't be in the vault at the same time. This is just laziness on their part. When you are a new player you get this random mish mosh of cards from opening packs and should have a better selection of walkers to choose from. Not to suit what you actually want to play but to suit what your collection dictates you have to play.When you first start plying maybe your collection is mostly blue and you want a good planeswalker to save for but you can't because a blue walker won't be in the vault for 4 weeks. Now the new player is stuck and frustrated having to play the worst planeswalker in the game J1 and you've just lost a customer because they are frustrated. Please reply to this post so we the community can understand why this choice was really made.

Steeme

Gideon wrote:

There is absolutely no reason all of the planeswalkers can't be in the vault at the same time. This is just laziness on their part. When you are a new player you get this random mish mosh of cards from opening packs and should have a better selection of walkers to choose from. Not to suit what you actually want to play but to suit what your collection dictates you have to play.When you first start plying maybe your collection is mostly blue and you want a good planeswalker to save for but you can't because a blue walker won't be in the vault for 4 weeks. Now the new player is stuck and frustrated having to play the worst planeswalker in the game J1 and you've just lost a customer because they are frustrated. Please reply to this post so we the community can understand why this choice was really made.

They really need to offer packages which contain one planeswalker and a competitive deck of cards specific to that walker. The deck can be 10 cards or it can be 10 + reserves, but it needs to be a specific set of cards (no randomness). It gives players the opportunity to buy a planeswalker and have a nicely designed deck right out of the gates.

After the basic decks are designed, they can eventually expand on this idea by creating "theme" decks, eg. Werewolves or Vampires. Offering this in the cash shop is a great idea. I suppose it can go for crystals as well but the problem is that they're giving crystals away like candy.. so that may or may not work for generating revenue.

octal9

D3, where is Sarkhan?

Ob Nixilis, Kiora, and Koth have all reentered the vault after leaving.

Sarkhan was removed before the rotating vault was announced. Jace 2.0 has entered the rotation. It's highly likely that Arlinn will be entering the rotation next week.

Every new walker pushes the availability of every other walker back another week. Right now we're at a 12 week rotation - that will increase to 13 with Arlinn, and 14 with Lilana 2.0, and 15 with Saheeli. One more planeswalker and we're at a 16 week rotation.

If you're going to do this you need to 1) make an actual rotation instead of skipping planeswalkers or 2) just increase the vault limit already. We're at only 33% availability (ie, we can only access four out of 12) to purchase planeswalkers. What gives?

D3. Where. Is. Sarkhan?

Tilikum

Ciotog

Is it worth picking up Ajani while I wait for Sarkhan to come back from whatever pilgrimage he is on? I have all the other 2 color PW that have hit the vault at lvl 60 so I don't feel that I need him since Nahri can play any combo he can but his mana spread looks better. His abilities always look a bit under whelming to me.

Plastic

Ciotog wrote:

Is it worth picking up Ajani while I wait for Sarkhan to come back from whatever pilgrimage he is on? I have all the other 2 color PW that have hit the vault at lvl 60 so I don't feel that I need him since Nahri can play any combo he can but his mana spread looks better. His abilities always look a bit under whelming to me.

He's definitely defensive compared to Nahiri. You can make use of his abilities to help secure objectives, that's for sure.

Not a must have overall imo, but it's nice to have choices if you have crystals to spare.

jimilinho_

*****
Bump
*****

Mostly as I have a couple deck ideas, the crystals to buy him and the runes to level him up.

So if someone could find him that'd be great, maybe even worth putting up a few missing posters as a lot of us don't remember what he looks like.

Pacone

The fact that he was the first to be removed, and there was no warning is most grieving.

Was the store so mindboggling to new players that it couldn't wait till next update? >_>

Rootbreaker

Gideon wrote:

There is absolutely no reason all of the planeswalkers can't be in the vault at the same time. This is just laziness on their part.
...

I feel like it's a poor design choice, but it's not laziness. The lazy thing to do would be not removing it, since that was how it worked before.

ZW2007-

My first ever forum post was deleted by the mods because I was being too negative about this change when it first happened. I don't remember exactly what I said but the general idea was to point out that the new model for the planeswalker rotation was not to help new players by making it less cluttered. They claimed this was the case but the real reason was to increase revenue. You want a certain planeswalker really badly? Better buy it while it's in the vault or risk not being able to buy it for months. Don't have enough crystals to buy it before it rotates out? Better buy more crystals with cash before it rotates out. Overall, the new rotation has hurt new players the most, and really really really irritated the players that are already invested in the game. I could go into more detail to support my claims but I'll just assume most, if not all of you, agree.

Rootbreaker

Honestly, I don't have a problem with them making choices to increase revenue, but they could have done it a lot better. For example, if they had announced it before doing it, you bet there would have a run on planeswalkers, with many people buying as many as they could - maybe even some people buying crystals so that they could buy more.

Also, they should have the planeswalkers rotating in on a schedule, so that if people want to buy a specific planeswalker, they can do so as soon as possible, rather than having to wait. I don't know if this happened, since I haven't really been paying attention to the planeswalker schedule, but my theory is that a new planeswalker like Sorin or Nahiri rotated into the vault in a week where Sarkhan would have otherwise, and instead of pushing the calendar of planeswalker to rotate in down a slot, they just replaced him. Maybe this has even happened twice. Then again, maybe they don't even have a calendar, and are just picking one to rotate in each month.

But again, they would make more money if they made less available planeswalkers available again, instead of ones that have been in the shop multiple times since the rotation was started.

Plastic

Rootbreaker wrote:

but my theory is that a new planeswalker like Sorin or Nahiri rotated into the vault in a week where Sarkhan would have otherwise, and instead of pushing the calendar of planeswalker to rotate in down a slot, they just replaced him. Maybe this has even happened twice. Then again, maybe they don't even have a calendar, and are just picking one to rotate in each month.

Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised if this is what happened. Come on D3+other staff, fix this junk!

ZW2007-

Rootbreaker wrote:

Honestly, I don't have a problem with them making choices to increase revenue, but they could have done it a lot better.

I agree completely. I just don't like the excuse they used that it was to reduce clutter and make it easier for new players (Maybe I'm wrong but pretty sure they said the new players bit) when they've made it so much easier for new players to make bad decisions. New players probably aren't frequenting the forums or other online resources for the game. They probably don't know about all the planeswakers that exist until they run into them in the wild. They might see what's in the vault and think that's all that there is and make a (bad) decision based off that. An elegant solution to the clutter would be to use the list feature that is available when editing your decks. Just list the planeswalkers like that and add the purchase button to the next screen after a player taps in. If they want to keep the rotation thing going, they can still use the list view and still show all the planeswalkers but make some purchasable and some not while listng when they will be available and unavailable. If I was a new player and wanted planeswalker X really badly but had no idea when/if X would be available again, I'd be more likely to quit playing than if I saw X would be back on December 16th for a cost of 250 . Plus it would be nice evaluate X's info in game so as to compare X to Y even if X and Y aren't available currently. And, a little off topic, it would be amazing to have a slider that let you adjust the planeswalker's level to see their stats at specific levels (mana gains, hp, ability costs and improvements, etc).