As expected, I´ve hit lvl 100 at the end of the week, choosing Garrosh of Might as my 6th RT hero. The new XP achievements has sent me back to 60% done (down from 80%), but since I´ve bought the mini set with gold (getting a nice coin thanks to that), it shouldn´t be a problem. At least I hope so, as I haven´t seen them yet, praying there´s no Oh my Yogg! difficulty this time :P As for mercenaries, I´ve hoarded 19 free packs from tasks, so I´m more than ready to get most of the new ones right away, even more so when I found out that there is free golden Tyreal mercenary in the shop! Yay!
@Avalon, thanks for the guide, I do have Balinda, but haven´t seen any comp including her? I´ve tried murlocs, dragons, humans, orcs, even nature comps, but to no luck :/ I think it´s mainly because I´m missing many of the required equipments locked behind heroic bosses. Ah well, never mind, maybe next time.. At least I have chicken! :D
GL with the new set and hopefully fresh meta? HF all and don´t forget to share! :)
Man, fealins chapter is awesome! All of the fights are unique, the characters diverse and the Story involves character developments, plottwists and callbacks to previous parts of the Story. You definetely have to give it a try, even if you disliked the previous books.
Wow, this could shake things up considerably. I can already see some potentially crazy synergy with some of these new Mercs (like using Brann with Elise to blast through the Golden Monkey quest).
Looking forward to misplaying terribly while I'm still getting used to all the new characters and abilities!
I've had some time taken up. Let's just say that I've been working on a project for a while, and I'll give you a little teaser in the spoiler below.
Show Spoiler
More on that will be revealed later...
In response to my card's feedback, I must admit that I do like the Treant-summoning idea. I'll see if I can make it work on the card*. Here's my thoughts on everything so far:
Wailor
I do prefer Spectacular Explosion over Allari the Souleater, and I think the wording on it is fine. I do think Allari looks better in her Rare-Demon form too. Deranged Shot is neat, but unfortunately the rate in which you deal damage versus buff C'Thun is incredibly weak.
Linkblade91
I like it. I do think "Keywords" is something Hearthstone will use like this someday (if what I'm saying makes sense). I think this looks pretty good. I remember The Forest's Aid being pretty good, and this kinda looks like that, so it seems quite solid to me.
AeroJulwin
A really cool idea (though I must also agree about the wording), and I do think it needs better artwork.
Anchorm4n
I unfortunately must agree that your card is both overpowered and not particularly compelling, but I think it can absolutely be worked into something better.
*I'm now finding that the idea is extremely similar to Link's card. Both would be 8 mana Epic Druid spells that summon Treants based on an excess quantity of some other entity.
How doesn't this work with Vanndar Stormpike? I'm seeing this a Dredge ANY card, minion or spell. So if you have spells that are higher cost or you drop this before Vanndar it's solid, right?
Vanndar Stormpike reduces cost of minions = less damage... At least that's how i think it works. (Tbh HS is inconsistant with effects like this and cost reduction sometimes.)
Hey, thanks for sharing your thoughts Flux! Very cool to hear about how much is possible and the efforts you're willing to make, we certainly appreciate it!
One thing I'd like to clarify about the battle of the cards aspect is that you'd get to see two random cards in the first display and pick your favorite. The next choice would be between your favorite from the first pick and another random card you haven't seen up to this point. That way you could get to see all of them in as much time as we use now. Here's an example from a German news site that lets you choose the best outfit worn at the Oscars in 2020 (scroll down until you see two pictures of people next to each other and click on the one you like better):
UPDATE5: In this thread, you were presented to a lot of powerful characters, all of each are basically immortal, since they continue to live even after death as a rememberence, but there's one thing in Elden Ring that can put a genuine end to one's life whether it's a mortal, demigod or god, and that thing is the Rune of Death, also know as Destined Death, which is guarded by one of the most fearsome warriors of the Lands Between, Maliketh, the Black Blade. He represents the Warrior and Priest classes, and his main gimmick, the Destined Death, funcitions as permanent and overtime damage in the game, so permanent damage will be one of his main mechanics in Hearthstone as it is in Elden Ring.
Maliketh is the brother and Empyrian Shadow (Which is just a fancy name for "God's Bodyguard") of Queen Marika , the guardian of the Elden Ring, which holds the very concepts of reality within itself, and one of those concepts is Death, but one day Marika decided to remove the concept of death from reality,so she removed the Rune of Death from the Elden Ring, making everyone in the lands immortal as consequence. Althought she took the Rune of Death out of the Elden Ring, she didn't discarded it, so she trusted the Rune of Death to Maliketh, infusing it to his blade, which became the only weapon capable of permanently killing anyone or anything, including gods and entitys. But on the Night of the Black Knifes, a fragment from the Rune of Death was stolen from Maliketh, and was used by the group know as the "Black Knifes" to kill Marika's favorite son, Godwyn the Golden. Infuriated by her son's murder, Marika completly destroyed the Elden Ring , and as punishment for his failure, Marika doomed Maliketh to ever hunger for Deathroot, the root from the tree that Godwyn's corpse lies, now Maliketh lives as a clergyman known as Gurranq, spending all of his days eating Deathroot and atoning for his ultimate sin. Even after all those events, Maliketh still guards the Rune of Death, which you need to reach the end of your jorney.
Is Portal really bad? You dont get the treasures but you save some time since, IMO, you really shouldnt be relying on treasures to win a boss fight.
It's situational. If you're grinding for a "Complete 4 Bounties" task, for example, portal is great. If you're trying to complete a heroic bounty to unlock an equipment, or doing a special event task (which are usually pretty daunting), you really need to get the best treasures, so portal is bad.
I really like this actually. Questline Hunter may not be Tier S anymore, but support for it would be appreciated. This does that. The issue with Questline Hunter is that you may run out of gas and are forced to integrate other mechanics to make it thrive. The Naga draw packages, and now damage package, will find a great home on it. It's basically Kill Command with legs
How doesn't this work with Vanndar Stormpike? I'm seeing this a Dredge ANY card, minion or spell. So if you have spells that are higher cost or you drop this before Vanndar it's solid, right?
I would tend to disagree with that. The improvements on Deadly Arsenal though are pretty solid. The cost is lower, albeit by one. The Dredge allows you to choose which card you want, to maximize the damage output. And the Dredge sets you up to draw as well. So while it may not be the best card DH or other classes may have seen it is still improved.
Yeah, but then? What else do you have? You don't have Soul Mirror of Psychic Scream anymore, and a Control deck needs a big board reset. You cannot reasonably rely on Shadow Word: Ruin to solve your problems.
Drown is very, very good, but we need something more.
Now what might take the sting from this issue would be to not rate them card for card anymore, but instead ordering them from first place to last (or maybe just picking the top 3). That's what most people seem to do anyway: pick your favorite and downvote all the rest to oblivion. KANSAS' idea of having "card battles" where you always see two cards and pick your favorite would be another iteration of the same concept. Do you think this would be possible from a programming point of view?
So, I'll respond with the typical "anything is possible" line because I love to use that internally as well, even though I know the staff must groan at me quite a bit when I do so.
Personally, I like the idea of doing a "pick your top 3 cards and rank them". It would be not as high effort as ranking all the cards, and it would force people to actually have a top 3 instead of the possibility of the downvote frenzy. Card battles sound like fun too, but I think there might be too much RNG factor there and without enough people going through it, we might end up with less than optimal results.
Either of these would be fairly easy to implement though on the backend. Having it work easily on the frontend though is a different story since we need to make sure it works really good on mobile too. Curse mobile devices!
Regarding prices, maybe we can talk Flux into dishing out a bronze Premium membership for a year for the person who accumulates the most wins during one season.
I don't have a problem with us offering something like this, it would be a pretty sweet reward for the top competitor of the season. I've wanted to do another kind of reward (physical) as well, for each individual competition, though never got the time to fully flesh that one out. No spoilers in case we do end up doing it.
When it comes to encourage participation, most of the above aims at just that. Picking up what Wailor said, I'd encourage Shadows to reach out to the winner of each competition and let them share their thoughts about their card in a weekly article like in the spotlight articles Demon does but smaller. This could be seen as some further encouragement and a reminder at the same time. Should be completely voluntarily of course.
We 100% could be doing more in our news feed for promoting the competitions and winners. We certainly push out enough content on Out of Cards that anything Fan Creations wouldn't become a huge wall of FC-only content on the homepage. We had that issue on the last site we were on due to the stupid rules we had to follow for posting content and all I could remember were the consistent complaints about "so much fan stuff omg". People still clicked on it though, to complain, so the metrics were still good lol. Granted, we'd probably still get the occasional complaint here, and honestly, I don't really care. Skipping content you don't like is easy enough and if all you want to do is complain, maybe we should do more FC content on the homepage to get them to leave, making the community more positive overall.
To attract more people, I believe having the competition panel be present on the main homepage would help immensely. I mean the main homepage, not just the hearthstone one. We do have hearthstone achievement guides pinned at the top of the article list already so the argument that non hearthstone people would be annoyed doesn't stand. Weekly "invitation" articles could help too.
I don't know why the custom scene has died out so much. I remember when there were 7 or so pages of discussion on hearthpwn. I really hope it bounces back, I adore these competitions.
Finalist voting also fucks me over at times and the number of people voting 1 stars is strange indeed. There are some individuals with very polarised opinions. Alone it wouldn't matter much, but since finalist voting has so few voters it can get skewed. At the whelp competition, there were 12-13 votes in the finals per card. In the normal phase there were 25-37 votes per card. That's more than a 50% loss in voters.
Another idea is having the finalist phase be advertised by an article on the main page. And you can put the cards in a grid with the stars beneath just like when you have card reveals.
I finished the last two earlier this week. I got most done on the first try, thanks to the guides here and Old Guardian's videos. The hardest one was definitely "Murlocs on Ice"; I was lucky to get it in two tries, but I can imagine people getting stuck on it for longer than that.
The more bad cards I saw, the more I realize, that they are trying to make the small pool of discover (minions/spells) more balanced. So you can't expect every time you discover will result in a good card.
Although, they could've have done this in the next expansion too. Because miniset tends to shake the meta a bit. This not it.
I love the solo content, whether it be adventures, dungeon runs or these books. I'm curious as to what makes this one replayable though. Presumably the characters have different decks and hero powers, but I wonder if there's more.
Totally agree! I've enjoyed the flavor of all the Book of Heroes/Mercenaries overall, though some of the decks they give you really suck. A fun play experience overall, plus free packs. I'm excited for this new one!
I think my favorites solo adventures were the Dalaran Heist and Saviors of Uldum ones: tons of replayability there. This new one sounds like it might be similar.
Meh, guess my card is overpowered and boring at the same time. I'll see if I find the time to think of something else. Thanks for all your feedback, here are my thoughts on your cards:
Wailor
I really like the flavor of the new Souldrinker, but I'm not a big fan of the art as it's Demon Hunter's WoW mount art (which has another name) if I remember correctly and it's just too dark and too detailed to look good on top of that. Balancing the stats of this one is super tricky, you've done a good job of it as far as I can tell though. The C'Thun alternative is a cool idea as well, but I'd up the damage to make it more worth the Mana (like 6 damage or something).
linkblade91
Nice flavor, very fitting for the new expansion. I could see this being printed actually, it has just the right amount of randomness for its cost. Fair warning: I might give you only 4 stars if you don't add a token.
AeroJulwin
Very cool idea, even if it looks a little complicated for a 1 drop. I really don't like the art though and agree with linkblade about the spelling ("Stores").
Demonxz95
An interesting idea, new mechanics are always exciting. I have to agree with much of the other's feedback though, even with Druid's ways to ramp and Mana Cheat this might be too expensive. Maybe you could reduce the cost and the number of cards drawn or put it on a stick (probably too close to Octosari, meh) or do something similar to Cannonmaster Smythe and transform all excess cards into treants?
Rewards Track: Current progress 5.0
As expected, I´ve hit lvl 100 at the end of the week, choosing Garrosh of Might as my 6th RT hero. The new XP achievements has sent me back to 60% done (down from 80%), but since I´ve bought the mini set with gold (getting a nice coin thanks to that), it shouldn´t be a problem. At least I hope so, as I haven´t seen them yet, praying there´s no Oh my Yogg! difficulty this time :P As for mercenaries, I´ve hoarded 19 free packs from tasks, so I´m more than ready to get most of the new ones right away, even more so when I found out that there is free golden Tyreal mercenary in the shop! Yay!
@Avalon, thanks for the guide, I do have Balinda, but haven´t seen any comp including her? I´ve tried murlocs, dragons, humans, orcs, even nature comps, but to no luck :/ I think it´s mainly because I´m missing many of the required equipments locked behind heroic bosses. Ah well, never mind, maybe next time.. At least I have chicken! :D
GL with the new set and hopefully fresh meta? HF all and don´t forget to share! :)
Hearthstone Patch 23.4 Is Now Live - Diablo Crossover for Mercenaries and Battlegrounds, Mini-Set, Solo Adventures, Arena, & More
Would you look at that, a 5GB update!
Not what I expect honestly, but they really need to let go BG and Mercs into another platform. Mobile users can't deal with this forever.
Hearthstone Patch 23.4 Is Now Live - Diablo Crossover for Mercenaries and Battlegrounds, Mini-Set, Solo Adventures, Arena, & More
Man, fealins chapter is awesome! All of the fights are unique, the characters diverse and the Story involves character developments, plottwists and callbacks to previous parts of the Story. You definetely have to give it a try, even if you disliked the previous books.
Hearthstone Patch 23.4 Is Now Live - Diablo Crossover for Mercenaries and Battlegrounds, Mini-Set, Solo Adventures, Arena, & More
Yo, that thumbnail is sick!
The Dawning Cataclysms - A Custom Hearthstone Expansion (FINISHED)
I came in expecting a custom expansion instead I found one of the other 4 people in the world who know about Project Moon
(and also a custom expansion good job on it so far)
Hearthstone Mercenaries Expands - 18 New Characters, Free Tyrael Legendary, Special Y’Shaarj Event, New Bounties, Features & Bugfixes
Wow, this could shake things up considerably. I can already see some potentially crazy synergy with some of these new Mercs (like using Brann with Elise to blast through the Golden Monkey quest).
Looking forward to misplaying terribly while I'm still getting used to all the new characters and abilities!
Too Much Is Not Enough - Card Design Competition Discussion Thread
I've had some time taken up. Let's just say that I've been working on a project for a while, and I'll give you a little teaser in the spoiler below.
More on that will be revealed later...
In response to my card's feedback, I must admit that I do like the Treant-summoning idea. I'll see if I can make it work on the card*. Here's my thoughts on everything so far:
*I'm now finding that the idea is extremely similar to Link's card. Both would be 8 mana Epic Druid spells that summon Treants based on an excess quantity of some other entity.
New Demon Hunter Spell - Topple the Idol
Vanndar Stormpike reduces cost of minions = less damage... At least that's how i think it works. (Tbh HS is inconsistant with effects like this and cost reduction sometimes.)
WCDC Season 5 Feedback Thread
Hey, thanks for sharing your thoughts Flux! Very cool to hear about how much is possible and the efforts you're willing to make, we certainly appreciate it!
One thing I'd like to clarify about the battle of the cards aspect is that you'd get to see two random cards in the first display and pick your favorite. The next choice would be between your favorite from the first pick and another random card you haven't seen up to this point. That way you could get to see all of them in as much time as we use now. Here's an example from a German news site that lets you choose the best outfit worn at the Oscars in 2020 (scroll down until you see two pictures of people next to each other and click on the one you like better):
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.spiegel.de/stil/oscars-2020-diese-outfits-trugen-die-stars-auf-dem-roten-teppich-a-f5e827b1-cc50-4106-b7cd-3b050d23ca28-amp
I'd be super excited to try this or the top 3 which need to be put in order with a slight favor to the latter.
(Bonus Update!) Elden Ring X Hearthstone: A set of 9 Duels heroes
UPDATE 5: In this thread, you were presented to a lot of powerful characters, all of each are basically immortal, since they continue to live even after death as a rememberence, but there's one thing in Elden Ring that can put a genuine end to one's life whether it's a mortal, demigod or god, and that thing is the Rune of Death, also know as Destined Death, which is guarded by one of the most fearsome warriors of the Lands Between, Maliketh, the Black Blade. He represents the Warrior and Priest classes, and his main gimmick, the Destined Death, funcitions as permanent and overtime damage in the game, so permanent damage will be one of his main mechanics in Hearthstone as it is in Elden Ring.
Maliketh is the brother and Empyrian Shadow (Which is just a fancy name for "God's Bodyguard") of Queen Marika , the guardian of the Elden Ring, which holds the very concepts of reality within itself, and one of those concepts is Death, but one day Marika decided to remove the concept of death from reality,so she removed the Rune of Death from the Elden Ring, making everyone in the lands immortal as consequence. Althought she took the Rune of Death out of the Elden Ring, she didn't discarded it, so she trusted the Rune of Death to Maliketh, infusing it to his blade, which became the only weapon capable of permanently killing anyone or anything, including gods and entitys. But on the Night of the Black Knifes, a fragment from the Rune of Death was stolen from Maliketh, and was used by the group know as the "Black Knifes" to kill Marika's favorite son, Godwyn the Golden. Infuriated by her son's murder, Marika completly destroyed the Elden Ring , and as punishment for his failure, Marika doomed Maliketh to ever hunger for Deathroot, the root from the tree that Godwyn's corpse lies, now Maliketh lives as a clergyman known as Gurranq, spending all of his days eating Deathroot and atoning for his ultimate sin. Even after all those events, Maliketh still guards the Rune of Death, which you need to reach the end of your jorney.
HERO POWERS
TREASURES
MALIKETH'S BOSS FIGHT
Deck Tracker Plugin
It's now working correctly!
Hearthstone Mercenaries Expands - 18 New Characters, Free Tyrael Legendary, Special Y’Shaarj Event, New Bounties, Features & Bugfixes
It's situational. If you're grinding for a "Complete 4 Bounties" task, for example, portal is great. If you're trying to complete a heroic bounty to unlock an equipment, or doing a special event task (which are usually pretty daunting), you really need to get the best treasures, so portal is bad.
New Hunter Minion - Ancient Krakenbane
I really like this actually. Questline Hunter may not be Tier S anymore, but support for it would be appreciated. This does that. The issue with Questline Hunter is that you may run out of gas and are forced to integrate other mechanics to make it thrive. The Naga draw packages, and now damage package, will find a great home on it. It's basically Kill Command with legs
New Druid Spell - Moonbeam
Malygos Druid just gave me herpes
New Demon Hunter Spell - Topple the Idol
How doesn't this work with Vanndar Stormpike? I'm seeing this a Dredge ANY card, minion or spell. So if you have spells that are higher cost or you drop this before Vanndar it's solid, right?
Special N’Zoth Event for Hearthstone Mercenaries Is Almost Over - Last Chance to Complete Some Tasks!
I think it took me something like 10 tries with multiple comps - I was about to give up...
New Demon Hunter Spell - Topple the Idol
I would tend to disagree with that. The improvements on Deadly Arsenal though are pretty solid. The cost is lower, albeit by one. The Dredge allows you to choose which card you want, to maximize the damage output. And the Dredge sets you up to draw as well. So while it may not be the best card DH or other classes may have seen it is still improved.
Our Thoughts on Throne of the Tides' New Mage, Paladin, Priest & Rogue Cards Coming to Hearthstone
Yeah, but then? What else do you have? You don't have Soul Mirror of Psychic Scream anymore, and a Control deck needs a big board reset. You cannot reasonably rely on Shadow Word: Ruin to solve your problems.
Drown is very, very good, but we need something more.
Our Thoughts on Throne of the Tides' New Mage, Paladin, Priest & Rogue Cards Coming to Hearthstone
I kinda disagree with the shadow cards pool being narrow. Drown is the single-target removal that was needed for a control shadow priest to rise.
WCDC Season 5 Feedback Thread
So, I'll respond with the typical "anything is possible" line because I love to use that internally as well, even though I know the staff must groan at me quite a bit when I do so.
Personally, I like the idea of doing a "pick your top 3 cards and rank them". It would be not as high effort as ranking all the cards, and it would force people to actually have a top 3 instead of the possibility of the downvote frenzy. Card battles sound like fun too, but I think there might be too much RNG factor there and without enough people going through it, we might end up with less than optimal results.
Either of these would be fairly easy to implement though on the backend. Having it work easily on the frontend though is a different story since we need to make sure it works really good on mobile too. Curse mobile devices!
I don't have a problem with us offering something like this, it would be a pretty sweet reward for the top competitor of the season. I've wanted to do another kind of reward (physical) as well, for each individual competition, though never got the time to fully flesh that one out. No spoilers in case we do end up doing it.
We 100% could be doing more in our news feed for promoting the competitions and winners. We certainly push out enough content on Out of Cards that anything Fan Creations wouldn't become a huge wall of FC-only content on the homepage. We had that issue on the last site we were on due to the stupid rules we had to follow for posting content and all I could remember were the consistent complaints about "so much fan stuff omg". People still clicked on it though, to complain, so the metrics were still good lol. Granted, we'd probably still get the occasional complaint here, and honestly, I don't really care. Skipping content you don't like is easy enough and if all you want to do is complain, maybe we should do more FC content on the homepage to get them to leave, making the community more positive overall.
WCDC Season 5 Feedback Thread
To attract more people, I believe having the competition panel be present on the main homepage would help immensely. I mean the main homepage, not just the hearthstone one. We do have hearthstone achievement guides pinned at the top of the article list already so the argument that non hearthstone people would be annoyed doesn't stand. Weekly "invitation" articles could help too.
I don't know why the custom scene has died out so much. I remember when there were 7 or so pages of discussion on hearthpwn. I really hope it bounces back, I adore these competitions.
Finalist voting also fucks me over at times and the number of people voting 1 stars is strange indeed. There are some individuals with very polarised opinions. Alone it wouldn't matter much, but since finalist voting has so few voters it can get skewed. At the whelp competition, there were 12-13 votes in the finals per card. In the normal phase there were 25-37 votes per card. That's more than a 50% loss in voters.
Another idea is having the finalist phase be advertised by an article on the main page. And you can put the cards in a grid with the stars beneath just like when you have card reveals.
Special N’Zoth Event for Hearthstone Mercenaries Is Almost Over - Last Chance to Complete Some Tasks!
I finished the last two earlier this week. I got most done on the first try, thanks to the guides here and Old Guardian's videos. The hardest one was definitely "Murlocs on Ice"; I was lucky to get it in two tries, but I can imagine people getting stuck on it for longer than that.
Our Thoughts on Throne of the Tides' New Mage, Paladin, Priest & Rogue Cards Coming to Hearthstone
The more bad cards I saw, the more I realize, that they are trying to make the small pool of discover (minions/spells) more balanced. So you can't expect every time you discover will result in a good card.
Although, they could've have done this in the next expansion too. Because miniset tends to shake the meta a bit. This not it.
Hearthstone's Book of Heroes Gets a New Entry This Week With Ambassador Faelin - 17 Missions, 3 Characters, 1 Card Back
Totally agree! I've enjoyed the flavor of all the Book of Heroes/Mercenaries overall, though some of the decks they give you really suck. A fun play experience overall, plus free packs. I'm excited for this new one!
I think my favorites solo adventures were the Dalaran Heist and Saviors of Uldum ones: tons of replayability there. This new one sounds like it might be similar.
Too Much Is Not Enough - Card Design Competition Discussion Thread
Meh, guess my card is overpowered and boring at the same time. I'll see if I find the time to think of something else. Thanks for all your feedback, here are my thoughts on your cards: