Ok, probably i'm mad, but i'm sitting on 50 mercs boosters, collected from the beginning as f2p, and i don't want to open them until extra coins (and maybe portraits system) are no longer a problem.
I think portraits should be a think only after one have unlock all mercs from boosters,
I've completed all normal routes of the pve, i have coins to craft all mercenaries (except valeera, sylvanas, garrosh) but i would like to find them with the boosters
I've completed also first 2 zones on heroic, but i think for going on with the others i need the better mercenaries, 'cause for now i've only ragnaros and grommash (not maxed)
Edit: i can't even win a single battle on pvp since the beginning of december... probably 'cause the only mercenaries i have maxed are rare...
I second the feeling that it's easier in the morning. I even used to get up early for those final 3 games to legend lol.
This month is hard for me though. Got to Diamond 2 full stars no less than 3 times this weekend and bounced back to Diamond 4 or even 5 each time. The Wild ladder is super diverse right now and whenenver I try to counter something, I run into something else (like facing three Mecha'Thun Linecracker Druids in a row, switching to Mecha'Thun Warlock and then meeting Hunter after Hunter after Hunter). Looks like I'll focus on having fun instead of climbing for the time being... I've played Mill Rogue for the first time ever and it was good actually. Other than that, Handbuff Paladin felt the most comfortable to me. Rather cheap deck too, so maybe that's something OP wants to try as well.
So yeah, I don't want to capture this thread for a meta discussion, but if it weren't for that abominable APM Mage stuff, I'd say Wild is in a very healthy spot right now. Lots of viable decks to choose from :)
Here's what I face and/or play on a regular basis between Diamond 5-2 on EU:
Odd QL Hunter, QL Pirate Warrior, Cutelock, Evenlock (with or without Reno), Linecracker Mecha'Thun Druid, C'thun Druid, Handbuff Paladin, Shudderwock Freeze Shaman, APM Mage (Flamewaker or Ignite version) are the top decks in my perception. Big Priest, Beast Druid, Kingsbane Rogue, Overload Shaman are a little below that power level, but still working well enough.
I don't have evidence for this, but to me it feels like ladder is easier in the morning. (I don't play all day, but my work schedule varies.)
By 10pm, there are so many good players to get matched against, I will usually go play Tavern Brawl or Mercenaries.
Might be that my brain is just better at finding lethal before noon Eastern time, and I'm just worn out from work and parenting by then. But it might be that the pool of players is smaller earlier in the day and the MMR range gets bigger.
even with reach being a thing the Daring Poro strategy will be very hard to disrupt.
most decks can kill 1-2 5/5 elusives already but 5+ of them that cost only 1 mana each? There is no deck that realistically can do so and even with reach there won't.
Especially Ionia doesn't have any form of counterplay to legacy Daring Poros despite being one of the regions witht the best removal in the game and being the region with the highest number of elusive units. Their elusive units are too small their counterspells can't interact with snacks/iceborn and their recall effects... well aren't that good when used on 1 mana units.
Other regions also struggle with poros (or more like cheap elusive spam that doesn't have to do anything with the original poro theme) no questions asked but given that THE counterplay regions knows no answer to this strategy make it look really degenerate to me.
You best bet is to rush the poro player and despite that being doable it's only doable for a small subset of decks.
I just hit level 123. XP achievements progress is stuck at 95% because the 2 remaining ones are still bugged.
I moved on to complete the other no XP rewarding achievements which are now mostly done as well.
Today, I finally caved and converted 76K arcane dust to complete my entire card collection. Just to cross this off my HS bucket list.
Annoying bugs aside, I am actually starting to lose interest in traditional HS because there are only a few goals left for me to achieve. Considering achievements were not even in the game before the first rewards track got introduced, it is amazing how my perception of the game was changed by them.
I played continuously since 2015 and I am not at all interested in Battlegrounds or Arena by the way. HS fatigue is finally setting in, I guess.
Take a break, only do your daily/weekly for a periode, you are allready way ahead on RT. then interest will come again.
For myself i keep it low, just reached lvl 74 so 20% xp now. And as allways Arena only, so low xp.
The first time is always the biggest hurdle to overcome and has more added pressure. Personally, I no longer set out to have to reach Legend each season. It either happens naturally or it does not. The only difference is just 1 extra single latest expansion pack as the season reward. A mindset of not seeing it as a big thing should certainly help with reducing stress.
Good point, I forgot to take into account that you might be missing some of the required legendaries. Please do not dust cards to be able to play my suggested deck. The overall winrate is not better than Pirate Warrior anyways and piloting Freeze Shudderwock Shaman has to suit your playstyle as well.
As for the end of month factor, some months have one or even few more days than others. This fact might just make the slightest of differences 🤭
I did some limited testing and it does seem like it’s easier at the end (you seem to play vs some already Legend players who are just memeing at that point).
One thing you can do to prevent yourself from stressing out about the climb is don’t think of it like a climb. Instead, try to get stats on a deck. For example, either with deck tracker or just writing it down, you can get stats as to how a deck is doing against different matchups. Try to commit to maybe 50 games, then see what are your good and bad matchups. Sometimes if a deck is truly over 50% winrate, you’ll just get to Legend naturally while testing a deck like this. Otherwise, you can at least see if your winrate is improving (for example is it higher in first half or last half of the games) and see if you’re facing a lot of good, bad or neutral matchups. Finally, you can try to keep going if it’s doing well, or if it didn’t naturally get you to Legend then clearly it’s not working out so you repeat this stat gathering for a different deck. Even if you don’t climb you still get useful stats and data, and when your “goal” is to get stats and not climb you feel like you’re making progress even if you don’t climb initially as you keep going towards your stat goal number of games.
Yes, I've seen this deck in action from someone on my friends list. It always seemed to me that the game was lost, but it always turned over after the Snowfall Guardian was played. I wouldn't mind try this deck, but I'm missing half of the cards. Six of which are legendary. But I only have enough dust for two. I don't know... if pirate warrior won't be successful enough, maybe I'll dust some cards to create this deck.
About climbing at the end of month - I think so too, but I can't rush it in a short time. I will try to get up a little bit every day. And then there may already be the end of the month.
I managed to hit Legend again using Freeze Shudderwock Shaman this season. My heart was almost beating out of my chest when I was facing my gatekeeper opponent.
The deck feels really good and has a decent chance against all the meta decks, even facing Pirate Warrior, Odd Questline Hunter and C'Thun Spell Druid head on.
I must admit that most games against these 3 decks were very tight until the turning point which is usually between turns 6 and 9. Timewise, games take much longer though since it is a Control deck after all.
You can try and give this deck a spin if Pirate Warrior does not work out for you. Just make sure you understand the deck before taking it to the ranked ladder climb. Piloting it is pretty straightforward actually, but I can provide you with some tips if you like.
By the way, I think the Legend ladder climb is a bit easier nearing the end of each month, but I do not have proper statistics to back this hypothesis up. What do you all think?
As promised, I will do my best this month. Today I've been climbed up 5 ranks. Hands was already shaking with tension, so I decided that was enough for today and went to conquer the battlegrounds.
Thanks to meisterz39 for the calculator. I don't know what my winning percentage is, but it looks like I'm going to have a lot of games anyway.
I don't really have a problem with spiders, Spiderling don't have evasive keywords so you can block them with your unit's, and SI/Freljords don't have many cheap ways of generating spiders outside of Crawling Sensation which you can play around. So yeah a Spider deck will out value you eventually but you can slow down their aggression until you get your own win con ready.
Elusive poros on the other hand are just cancer, you can tutor them with Poro Herder, you have many cheap ways to generate more in the form of Poro Cannon and Iterative Improvement and contrary to spiders they don't entirely depends on Iceborn Legacy, because they have Poro Snax for extra buffs. Then you have the Elusive keyword which require you to have a unit plus Sharpsight or a silence just to block the damn thing.
The game definitely need more reach like effects. Otherwise any time they make some good buff cards, you can bet that some elusive deck is gonna abuse them. It already happened in the past with Solitary Monk and Stand Alone and more recently with Poppy/Zed.
I think poros and spiders mainly work because they have many cheap units that get buffed by Iceborn Legacy to unresonable sizes. There is simply no elusive deck that can compete with a bunch of 5/5 Daring Poros or any midrange/control list that can answer turn 5 boards filled with 4/3 spiderlings
To me the best thing riot could do now is to revert Iceborn Legacy to it's original effect which means 3 mana burst speed but only grant +1/+1.
The advice of playing faster decks is certainly good advice. I've been playing since Whispers of the old Gods, and I've only ever hit legend twice because I rarely find time to play enough games to get there (it doesn't much help that I often prefer slower decks). Here's a simulator for how many games you'll have to play in any given season: https://www.primedope.com/number-of-games-to-reach-legend-in-hearthstone/. Even when you're starting with a 10-star bonus from legend in the previous season and playing a top tier deck, you're probably looking at an aggregate of 10 to 15 (maybe even 20) hours of gameplay to get back there in a given season. Drop down just one level to starting from Diamond 5's 9-star bonus and you could easily be adding several hours onto that.
At some level, though, it's all mental. If you win with your deck more than you lose, you'll get there eventually. And the fact is you need to play a lot of games to get to legend, so if the stress of losses makes you play less than you might otherwise without that stress you won't get there. Ultimately I decided to reorient my goals in the game away from ladder rank (which often leaves me stressed out about losses once I get to a high enough rank) and more toward overall wins and those associated rewards. Setting goals like "get all the golden heroes" has helped me to care less about ladder losses, which led to higher end-of-season rankings on average because I enjoyed playing more.
he wants to farm honor, not xp so mercs doesnt work. for me, duels is the fast way to farm because games are faster
duels is the fast way to farm because games are faster for the first 3-4 games. After that duels games tend to go on for way longer than the average ranked/standard match.
You can afk farm xp by playing mercs, so you just do an attack wait 15 minutes then do another attack and you collect xp while waiting those 15 minutes. It boring so I don't recommend it but it is a way to farm xp if you want to.
I'm only at 1200 honor right now. I haven't been playing much because the Wild meta is terrible and Mercenaries is eating up time. I guess I could play more Standard or stop grinding Mercenaries.
It doesn't help that the majority of my opponents is Alliance. If the rewards were equal, I'd have picked Horde, but Vanndar just fits my play style so much more better than Derk'Thar.
I haven't hit Legend since Ungoro times (what a slog that was), though I've hit Diamond 1 quite a few times.
You're not alone!
During the rewards unwrap at the start of a new month, the game used to tell us "hey, you reached the rank of XYZ, and that is higher than NN % of Hearthstone players." That percentage made it clear that the vast majority of players never reach Legend, despite how it sometimes feels in the comments of a game-focused website.
9th January update: EnDjinn's Reno Hakkar Paladin: Travelling through the Diamond ladder!
The quote from Gandalf is very relevant at the start: "So do all who live to see such times but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."
How do we use the time that is given to us? I am glad that I have invested the time to try this great off-meta deck. Thanks to EnDjinn - I am 9-4 with this deck, and it has helped me to traverse the diamond ladder!
Big Mercenaries Updates Coming Soon - New Zone, Bounties, Equipment Change, and Training Grounds
Ok, probably i'm mad, but i'm sitting on 50 mercs boosters, collected from the beginning as f2p, and i don't want to open them until extra coins (and maybe portraits system) are no longer a problem.
I think portraits should be a think only after one have unlock all mercs from boosters,
I've completed all normal routes of the pve, i have coins to craft all mercenaries (except valeera, sylvanas, garrosh) but i would like to find them with the boosters
I've completed also first 2 zones on heroic, but i think for going on with the others i need the better mercenaries, 'cause for now i've only ragnaros and grommash (not maxed)
Edit: i can't even win a single battle on pvp since the beginning of december... probably 'cause the only mercenaries i have maxed are rare...
Reach Legend Rank
I second the feeling that it's easier in the morning. I even used to get up early for those final 3 games to legend lol.
This month is hard for me though. Got to Diamond 2 full stars no less than 3 times this weekend and bounced back to Diamond 4 or even 5 each time. The Wild ladder is super diverse right now and whenenver I try to counter something, I run into something else (like facing three Mecha'Thun Linecracker Druids in a row, switching to Mecha'Thun Warlock and then meeting Hunter after Hunter after Hunter). Looks like I'll focus on having fun instead of climbing for the time being... I've played Mill Rogue for the first time ever and it was good actually. Other than that, Handbuff Paladin felt the most comfortable to me. Rather cheap deck too, so maybe that's something OP wants to try as well.
So yeah, I don't want to capture this thread for a meta discussion, but if it weren't for that abominable APM Mage stuff, I'd say Wild is in a very healthy spot right now. Lots of viable decks to choose from :)
Reach Legend Rank
I don't have evidence for this, but to me it feels like ladder is easier in the morning. (I don't play all day, but my work schedule varies.)
By 10pm, there are so many good players to get matched against, I will usually go play Tavern Brawl or Mercenaries.
Might be that my brain is just better at finding lethal before noon Eastern time, and I'm just worn out from work and parenting by then. But it might be that the pool of players is smaller earlier in the day and the MMR range gets bigger.
Try it out, if your schedule allows.
Up To Date Winrates Post Patch
even with reach being a thing the Daring Poro strategy will be very hard to disrupt.
most decks can kill 1-2 5/5 elusives already but 5+ of them that cost only 1 mana each? There is no deck that realistically can do so and even with reach there won't.
Especially Ionia doesn't have any form of counterplay to legacy Daring Poros despite being one of the regions witht the best removal in the game and being the region with the highest number of elusive units. Their elusive units are too small their counterspells can't interact with snacks/iceborn and their recall effects... well aren't that good when used on 1 mana units.
Other regions also struggle with poros (or more like cheap elusive spam that doesn't have to do anything with the original poro theme) no questions asked but given that THE counterplay regions knows no answer to this strategy make it look really degenerate to me.
You best bet is to rush the poro player and despite that being doable it's only doable for a small subset of decks.
Rewards Track Progress: 4.0
Take a break, only do your daily/weekly for a periode, you are allready way ahead on RT. then interest will come again.
For myself i keep it low, just reached lvl 74 so 20% xp now. And as allways Arena only, so low xp.
Reach Legend Rank
The first time is always the biggest hurdle to overcome and has more added pressure. Personally, I no longer set out to have to reach Legend each season. It either happens naturally or it does not. The only difference is just 1 extra single latest expansion pack as the season reward. A mindset of not seeing it as a big thing should certainly help with reducing stress.
Good point, I forgot to take into account that you might be missing some of the required legendaries. Please do not dust cards to be able to play my suggested deck. The overall winrate is not better than Pirate Warrior anyways and piloting Freeze Shudderwock Shaman has to suit your playstyle as well.
As for the end of month factor, some months have one or even few more days than others. This fact might just make the slightest of differences 🤭
Reach Legend Rank
Pirate Warrior is good enough for sure.
I did some limited testing and it does seem like it’s easier at the end (you seem to play vs some already Legend players who are just memeing at that point).
One thing you can do to prevent yourself from stressing out about the climb is don’t think of it like a climb. Instead, try to get stats on a deck. For example, either with deck tracker or just writing it down, you can get stats as to how a deck is doing against different matchups. Try to commit to maybe 50 games, then see what are your good and bad matchups. Sometimes if a deck is truly over 50% winrate, you’ll just get to Legend naturally while testing a deck like this. Otherwise, you can at least see if your winrate is improving (for example is it higher in first half or last half of the games) and see if you’re facing a lot of good, bad or neutral matchups. Finally, you can try to keep going if it’s doing well, or if it didn’t naturally get you to Legend then clearly it’s not working out so you repeat this stat gathering for a different deck. Even if you don’t climb you still get useful stats and data, and when your “goal” is to get stats and not climb you feel like you’re making progress even if you don’t climb initially as you keep going towards your stat goal number of games.
Reach Legend Rank
Yes, I've seen this deck in action from someone on my friends list. It always seemed to me that the game was lost, but it always turned over after the Snowfall Guardian was played. I wouldn't mind try this deck, but I'm missing half of the cards. Six of which are legendary. But I only have enough dust for two. I don't know... if pirate warrior won't be successful enough, maybe I'll dust some cards to create this deck.
About climbing at the end of month - I think so too, but I can't rush it in a short time. I will try to get up a little bit every day. And then there may already be the end of the month.
Reminder: Full Dust Refunds for Alterac Valley's Drek'Thar and Vanndar Stormpike Cards End on January 10
Wow, didn't know that. Thanks!
Reach Legend Rank
I managed to hit Legend again using Freeze Shudderwock Shaman this season. My heart was almost beating out of my chest when I was facing my gatekeeper opponent.
The deck feels really good and has a decent chance against all the meta decks, even facing Pirate Warrior, Odd Questline Hunter and C'Thun Spell Druid head on.
I must admit that most games against these 3 decks were very tight until the turning point which is usually between turns 6 and 9. Timewise, games take much longer though since it is a Control deck after all.
You can try and give this deck a spin if Pirate Warrior does not work out for you. Just make sure you understand the deck before taking it to the ranked ladder climb. Piloting it is pretty straightforward actually, but I can provide you with some tips if you like.
By the way, I think the Legend ladder climb is a bit easier nearing the end of each month, but I do not have proper statistics to back this hypothesis up. What do you all think?
Reach Legend Rank
As promised, I will do my best this month. Today I've been climbed up 5 ranks. Hands was already shaking with tension, so I decided that was enough for today and went to conquer the battlegrounds.
Thanks to meisterz39 for the calculator. I don't know what my winning percentage is, but it looks like I'm going to have a lot of games anyway.
Up To Date Winrates Post Patch
I don't really have a problem with spiders, Spiderling don't have evasive keywords so you can block them with your unit's, and SI/Freljords don't have many cheap ways of generating spiders outside of Crawling Sensation which you can play around. So yeah a Spider deck will out value you eventually but you can slow down their aggression until you get your own win con ready.
Elusive poros on the other hand are just cancer, you can tutor them with Poro Herder, you have many cheap ways to generate more in the form of Poro Cannon and Iterative Improvement and contrary to spiders they don't entirely depends on Iceborn Legacy, because they have Poro Snax for extra buffs. Then you have the Elusive keyword which require you to have a unit plus Sharpsight or a silence just to block the damn thing.
The game definitely need more reach like effects. Otherwise any time they make some good buff cards, you can bet that some elusive deck is gonna abuse them. It already happened in the past with Solitary Monk and Stand Alone and more recently with Poppy/Zed.
Up To Date Winrates Post Patch
I think poros and spiders mainly work because they have many cheap units that get buffed by Iceborn Legacy to unresonable sizes. There is simply no elusive deck that can compete with a bunch of 5/5 Daring Poros or any midrange/control list that can answer turn 5 boards filled with 4/3 spiderlings
To me the best thing riot could do now is to revert Iceborn Legacy to it's original effect which means 3 mana burst speed but only grant +1/+1.
Old Iceborn Legacy was really good New Iceborn Legacy is imo too good.
What do you think?
Hot Take Card Inbalance Is Healthy For CCG's
I’m aware that’s how it works. It’s the unfortunate bi-product of card games
Reminder: Full Dust Refunds for Alterac Valley's Drek'Thar and Vanndar Stormpike Cards End on January 10
yeah, you are right, I focused on aggro decks and after 5 or 6 games I quit the run and restart
Reach Legend Rank
The advice of playing faster decks is certainly good advice. I've been playing since Whispers of the old Gods, and I've only ever hit legend twice because I rarely find time to play enough games to get there (it doesn't much help that I often prefer slower decks). Here's a simulator for how many games you'll have to play in any given season: https://www.primedope.com/number-of-games-to-reach-legend-in-hearthstone/. Even when you're starting with a 10-star bonus from legend in the previous season and playing a top tier deck, you're probably looking at an aggregate of 10 to 15 (maybe even 20) hours of gameplay to get back there in a given season. Drop down just one level to starting from Diamond 5's 9-star bonus and you could easily be adding several hours onto that.
At some level, though, it's all mental. If you win with your deck more than you lose, you'll get there eventually. And the fact is you need to play a lot of games to get to legend, so if the stress of losses makes you play less than you might otherwise without that stress you won't get there. Ultimately I decided to reorient my goals in the game away from ladder rank (which often leaves me stressed out about losses once I get to a high enough rank) and more toward overall wins and those associated rewards. Setting goals like "get all the golden heroes" has helped me to care less about ladder losses, which led to higher end-of-season rankings on average because I enjoyed playing more.
Reminder: Full Dust Refunds for Alterac Valley's Drek'Thar and Vanndar Stormpike Cards End on January 10
duels is the fast way to farm because games are faster for the first 3-4 games. After that duels games tend to go on for way longer than the average ranked/standard match.
Reminder: Full Dust Refunds for Alterac Valley's Drek'Thar and Vanndar Stormpike Cards End on January 10
he wants to farm honor, not xp so mercs doesnt work. for me, duels is the fast way to farm because games are faster
Reminder: Full Dust Refunds for Alterac Valley's Drek'Thar and Vanndar Stormpike Cards End on January 10
You can afk farm xp by playing mercs, so you just do an attack wait 15 minutes then do another attack and you collect xp while waiting those 15 minutes. It boring so I don't recommend it but it is a way to farm xp if you want to.
Reminder: Full Dust Refunds for Alterac Valley's Drek'Thar and Vanndar Stormpike Cards End on January 10
I'm only at 1200 honor right now. I haven't been playing much because the Wild meta is terrible and Mercenaries is eating up time. I guess I could play more Standard or stop grinding Mercenaries.
It doesn't help that the majority of my opponents is Alliance. If the rewards were equal, I'd have picked Horde, but Vanndar just fits my play style so much more better than Derk'Thar.
Reno Secret Hunter
Portrait: Firefang Rexxar
Cardback: Mysteries of the Phoenix
Reminder: Full Dust Refunds for Alterac Valley's Drek'Thar and Vanndar Stormpike Cards End on January 10
I know now why I'm so far behind then lol. Thanks for clarifying!
Reminder: Full Dust Refunds for Alterac Valley's Drek'Thar and Vanndar Stormpike Cards End on January 10
Same rules as per the daily quests. You need to either reach 10 turns or 15 health before conceding or you dont get those honor points.
Reach Legend Rank
I haven't hit Legend since Ungoro times (what a slog that was), though I've hit Diamond 1 quite a few times.
You're not alone!
During the rewards unwrap at the start of a new month, the game used to tell us "hey, you reached the rank of XYZ, and that is higher than NN % of Hearthstone players." That percentage made it clear that the vast majority of players never reach Legend, despite how it sometimes feels in the comments of a game-focused website.
Darkseeker's channel - 13th November update: KOtsosKOtsos' Reno Evolve Shudderwock Shaman - ft. Archivist Elysiana
9th January update: EnDjinn's Reno Hakkar Paladin: Travelling through the Diamond ladder!
The quote from Gandalf is very relevant at the start: "So do all who live to see such times but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."
How do we use the time that is given to us? I am glad that I have invested the time to try this great off-meta deck. Thanks to EnDjinn - I am 9-4 with this deck, and it has helped me to traverse the diamond ladder!
Deck code: AAEBAZ8FHvoOwxaFF9/EAqDOAsPqAp3sAtn+As+GA5aKA5WUA7mYA4OhA/yjA5WmA5GxA5XNA4/OA5PQA+DRA4vVA/voA6bvA/D2A4v4A9j5A7eABOCLBMmgBNWgBAAA
https://youtu.be/oRycfy1ktFc