Not sure what happened with your tickets, but the OG Arena tickets definitely stacked and they also got converted to Tavern tickets when that change came. I have like 5-7 on Asia and US server each, over the years banked up still, and new tickets keep stacking, so im talking from personal experience.
Lots of questions... Most of all, why did I hit 12-0 with this deck?! I mean, why would you ever run a wand maker over a nerubian egg? What's so good about deeprun engineer? And whyyy is there a selective breeder with a single beast in the deck? Once the draw messes you up, this card is done for.
I got some answers during my run, wich demonstrate some genious decisions.
Deeprun engineer can find stuff like darkmoon tank while providing flexibility and an early play. Selective breeder ant Warsong Wrangler don't to draw Deathstrider. With this card in hand, you probably won anyways. Also, the fact that there are no other beasts, allows you to draft a couple beasts during the run without messing up the Deathstalker draw engine. The wandmaker over a nerubian egg is the only thing i dont really understand.
The true king has to be Loatheb though.
Oh and the 12 wins were done without any deathrattle related passives! I got battlecry cost reduction and the adventurers at the start of each turn (extremly strong for board control)
appreciate your opinion. Thanks for the response. I think you are a bit lenient with them though and you overestimate the effort needed here from their side.
1. Yes they obviously have other things to do, but that would be a small thing for them which could be prioritized (obviously this is subjective); also this can be said for any change at any time as they always have other things to do
2. Why not? Many games do it and this would not take much time and effort (I am working in IT myself and no, tweaking one or two cards would definitely not take much time or effort)
3. I don't decide but I 100% believe that The Demon Seed is the right target here. Why nerf multiple cards that were not a problem at all before when one would do? Also this card in its current form limits design space for the future
That would be a rather impactful change imo by the way but that might just be me (might be a bit prejudiced since last week when I lost like eight games in a row against Quest Warlock without seeing any other deck)
Would it be better if it said "at least a little"?
This ain't being out of tune with Wild, this is setting expectations. I don't know why folks think that Wild is going to get this massive balance overhaul. Blizzard has repeatedly stated that the format is not meant to be balanced except in the most exceptional of circumstances. One can desire more, but there's no reason to throw an attack at Avalon for bringing us the news.
I agree with Avalon, we can be confident that Questline will receive a little bit of a tone down and that we should not expect massive changes.
They may have not presented the game mode in the wisest possible way, but you sound like you already know everything about it and you can give a very trustworthy verdict. Which is definitely not the case.
Okay, let's nerf The Demon Seed - how? And by "how" I mean: how to nerf in order to make it less powerful but not completely destroy it. Because, you know, people who play and enjoy Questline Warlock are players too!
Secondly, please calm down. Directing the frustrations Wild is currently towards content creators (and in this case me) is quite the useless move, since we (I) don't have the slightest power to decide wether something will be done or not. We (I) can only speak up based on what we think, but that is all.
Finally, if a large part of the Wild community has been interacting without proper manners in the last few days, that does not mean that you are allowed to do the same.
"While we don't know what cards are going to be hit, we are fairly confident that Questline Warlock should be toned down a little."
Only toned down a litte? Are you joking or are you so out of touch to the Wild format like the devs?
This deck has to be toned down by a lot to give control a chance to breath in Wild again. Maybe it should even be completely banned in Wild like Stealer of Cheese before.
The issue with that is it's not necessarily a nerf unless you make the number of self-damage instances very high. It's not difficult for Warlock to do tons of tiny increments of damage to itself for very cheap or even for free. And now since the damage amount wouldn't matter, the intended major downside of the Quest, i.e. the fact you have to chunk down half of your health pool, would suddenly be reduced to only having to take 10 or 12 damage total, and that's before the healing would come in. So you might end up in a situation where you try to nerf the quest and unintentionally leave it feeling the same.
Hear me out, this idea was suggested ages ago for Arena but I'd make a slight adjustment due to Blizzard's "greed".
A new "Keep Cards drafted" option could appear in Arena, where you can permanently keep the cards you draft in your arena deck. Blizzard may want to attach an extra 500 gold fee or something, but it could be an interesting way to get cards you don't own. It would be a great incentive coz of the rotating sets in Arena every few months and you could collect wild and standard cards. Ofc, that would incentivize you to pick only cards you don't own instead of making a decent deck, but you wouldn't really feel bad at the end of the run coz you'd have collected a bunch of new cards anyway. There'd have to be some UI changes ofc, like a glowing boarder around cards you don't own.
Yep, just like Runeterra. Hearthstone implemented the Tavern Tickets years ago before Runeterra existed, but I know on at least one occasion - pre Rewards-track - I was supposed to have multiple, but I was only able to cash one in. It wasn't tracked anywhere in the client that I could see as a player. I expected them to get more formalized when they started offering them in the Rewards Track, but it's still this quasi-feature that's also easily confused with the Tavern Pass and the Battlegrounds Perks (which offer Tavern Tickets). Formalizing it would be so easy, and put them on par with their main competitor, but instead we get vague hints that Cora might work on something as an individual around Christmas when she should otherwise be taking vacation. For her sake, I'd rather have her go on vacation. Have it be a team priority for the game, not a passion project.
Given what the most recent changes have been like, I'm not hopeful. It's nice they're at least finally acknowledging the problem after two patches of doing nothing to address it, but given how meek and minute the changes have been, I'm fairly confident that out of the 6+ cards that need changing in Warlock alone, barely half of them is going to get addressed. And who knows how many of the changes that do make it through actually achieve what was intended. And that's just talking about Warlock. I think it's safe to say even if Warlock takes a galactic nerfing the meta won't be any more favourable to control than it is right now, since Shamans, Mages, Hunters and potentially Paladins will take over the mantle and quest control into oblivion.
Here are just a couple reasons that explain why you're wrong:
Team 5 has other things to do other than balancing cards: sure, it's part of their job, but they have other things to do as well!
Patches take quite some time and effort to be made: you don't want to make one just for a single card change, do you?
You actually got to decide what and how to nerf? Is The Demon Seed the right card to nerf? Are there any other cards that are more problematic? If it's The Demon Seed, how do you nerf it?
Wild already has very little balance changes per year: at least let them be as impactful as possible!
I'm sure we'll finally see warlock demon seed get nerfed, I just think fundamentally circumventing the fatigue mechanic is what is making it broken. I have a feeling that we'll see a change to how tamsin interacts with fatigue, but we'll have to wait and see how things flesh out...
It's been an active hobby and I'm an adult with a stable job so I don't exactly begrudge the $50 I spent every few months. But it's objectively a steep price to pay for what we're getting, and I genuinely think we're getting less and less each expansion. After the final balance patch during Barrens I actually thought the Standard meta was in a fantastic place. But it took literal months. And then United in Stormwind completely ruined the meta again. This has been a consistent cycle of them not play-testing or balancing OBVIOUS broken cards before releasing a set. What if, for example, instead of putting intensive resources into a new game (not a mode), they put that energy into the back-end so they could patch/alter the game on the fly much easier? Having each nerf cycle take a month simply isn't fun, especially when they don't usually get it right on the first try.
This sounds eerily similar to Legends of Runeterra. Weekly chests, that upon earning enough weekly experience, gives you an expedition token (the equivalent of a tavern ticket.) Which I would approve of. I think casual duels should go bye-bye and as long as duels is a supported and balanced mode, heroic duels should just be...duels. We should get a tavern ticket with our weekly "win 5 ranked games" quest.
Also we should be getting slightly more rewards in general since the new mercenaries mode apparently is going to be stretching gold resources even thinner.
Without much work they could 1) Make Tavern Tickets an official in-game currency. 2) Award 1 free Tavern Ticket per week for completing a quest or objective (i.e. complete 2 weekly quests to earn it). For the last several cycles I've been so focused on saving up 2000 gold for the mini-set, that I don't spend my gold on Arena like I used to. They need greater rewards all around, but the two changes above would go a long way towards creating the interest and player base again for Arena and Heroic Duels (I think Casual Duels should be eliminated with easier ways to earn Tavern Tickets).
It would be a massive chore to work out the balance though because the amount of damage you actually do to yourself becomes hidden behind the statistics of what 'hurting yourself X times' actually means. Is it as small as X damage? Or is it closer to 3X, or even 5X? So I doubt they'd want to rework it that way.
Better just to change the wording of Crystallizer to convert your health into armour like High Priest Thekal does (with an appropriate mechanical change in the code too). That way Crystallizer doesn't actually deal damage to you, and no longer violates the balance of the card because you actually have to deal 6+7+8-2*3=15 damage to yourself.
yeah i agree.. instead of progressing the quest 5/6 with a single Crystallizer (with no drawback), they can make it like 'deal damage to urself 3/4/5 times' or sth.
I mean... we know it's easy to say this from an amateur game-designer perspective.. but if Warlock quest would count times of dealt damage instead of actual damage it could easily be balanced. Like for example if it said: Deal damage to your hero 5 times to progress etc...
Sure the final reward is crazy strong still but at least it would be a start...
Shaman Quest works the same way. It doesn't count overloaded crystals but the frequency of your overload.
A man can dream... (which Blizzard is obviously doing too lol)
I don't know if I should be grateful that they acknowledge the situation in Wild at all or appalled as we have to endure another month of this shit meta. Probably the latter. Nerfing a single card should not take that long.
I had the exact same observations as you did and I have also no clue whatsoever what needs to be done to solve the second puzzle. Perhaps the WOW Secrets team had more luck in figuring things out and report back to us with hopefully good news. Seems like this puzzle is slight more complex even when compared to the first one because it has been quite silent since the server hotfix went live.
You get a board full of minions of different tribes on one side, and on your side a single mystery minion flanked by two copies of the opposing minions that seem to be selected randomly and change everytime the puzzle resets.
You have a hand full of cards that you can use on the mystery minion. Each one represents a different tribe. The first time you use a card on the mystery minion it transforms into a 0/1 minion of that tribe (not related to the opposing minions though). After that you can play 6 more cards before the puzzle resets again. These add a digit to the minion's stat values, corresponding to their position in hand (left to right, 1-9, then 0).
Literally 0 idea what is going on there. Tried to transform it into a matching tribe to copy the statlines of the flanking minions, but that does nothing. Tried some adding and subtracting numbers, but that also lead nowhere.
Hearthstone's Arena Mode Could Potentially See Updates Next Year Thanks to Blizzard's Annual "Free Your Mind" Event
Not sure what happened with your tickets, but the OG Arena tickets definitely stacked and they also got converted to Tavern tickets when that change came. I have like 5-7 on Asia and US server each, over the years banked up still, and new tickets keep stacking, so im talking from personal experience.
landsellers' 12 Wins Deathrattle Hunter
Lots of questions... Most of all, why did I hit 12-0 with this deck?!
I mean, why would you ever run a wand maker over a nerubian egg?
What's so good about deeprun engineer?
And whyyy is there a selective breeder with a single beast in the deck? Once the draw messes you up, this card is done for.
I got some answers during my run, wich demonstrate some genious decisions.
Deeprun engineer can find stuff like darkmoon tank while providing flexibility and an early play.
Selective breeder ant Warsong Wrangler don't to draw Deathstrider. With this card in hand, you probably won anyways. Also, the fact that there are no other beasts, allows you to draft a couple beasts during the run without messing up the Deathstalker draw engine.
The wandmaker over a nerubian egg is the only thing i dont really understand.
The true king has to be Loatheb though.
Oh and the 12 wins were done without any deathrattle related passives!
I got battlecry cost reduction and the adventurers at the start of each turn (extremly strong for board control)
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
Hi there,
appreciate your opinion. Thanks for the response. I think you are a bit lenient with them though and you overestimate the effort needed here from their side.
1. Yes they obviously have other things to do, but that would be a small thing for them which could be prioritized (obviously this is subjective); also this can be said for any change at any time as they always have other things to do
2. Why not? Many games do it and this would not take much time and effort (I am working in IT myself and no, tweaking one or two cards would definitely not take much time or effort)
3. I don't decide but I 100% believe that The Demon Seed is the right target here. Why nerf multiple cards that were not a problem at all before when one would do? Also this card in its current form limits design space for the future
That would be a rather impactful change imo by the way but that might just be me (might be a bit prejudiced since last week when I lost like eight games in a row against Quest Warlock without seeing any other deck)
Cheers
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
FWIW folks responsible for game balance are not the same people that are developing new modes.
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
Would it be better if it said "at least a little"?
This ain't being out of tune with Wild, this is setting expectations. I don't know why folks think that Wild is going to get this massive balance overhaul. Blizzard has repeatedly stated that the format is not meant to be balanced except in the most exceptional of circumstances. One can desire more, but there's no reason to throw an attack at Avalon for bringing us the news.
I agree with Avalon, we can be confident that Questline will receive a little bit of a tone down and that we should not expect massive changes.
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
They may have not presented the game mode in the wisest possible way, but you sound like you already know everything about it and you can give a very trustworthy verdict. Which is definitely not the case.
Okay, let's nerf The Demon Seed - how? And by "how" I mean: how to nerf in order to make it less powerful but not completely destroy it. Because, you know, people who play and enjoy Questline Warlock are players too!
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
First of all, it's a figure of speech.
Secondly, please calm down. Directing the frustrations Wild is currently towards content creators (and in this case me) is quite the useless move, since we (I) don't have the slightest power to decide wether something will be done or not. We (I) can only speak up based on what we think, but that is all.
Finally, if a large part of the Wild community has been interacting without proper manners in the last few days, that does not mean that you are allowed to do the same.
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
For example creating a new cash grab mode for Hearthstone "nobody needs".
Yes, yes and yes. There is no other way to "heal" Wild at the moment.
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
Only toned down a litte? Are you joking or are you so out of touch to the Wild format like the devs?
This deck has to be toned down by a lot to give control a chance to breath in Wild again. Maybe it should even be completely banned in Wild like Stealer of Cheese before.
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
The issue with that is it's not necessarily a nerf unless you make the number of self-damage instances very high. It's not difficult for Warlock to do tons of tiny increments of damage to itself for very cheap or even for free. And now since the damage amount wouldn't matter, the intended major downside of the Quest, i.e. the fact you have to chunk down half of your health pool, would suddenly be reduced to only having to take 10 or 12 damage total, and that's before the healing would come in. So you might end up in a situation where you try to nerf the quest and unintentionally leave it feeling the same.
Hearthstone's Arena Mode Could Potentially See Updates Next Year Thanks to Blizzard's Annual "Free Your Mind" Event
Hear me out, this idea was suggested ages ago for Arena but I'd make a slight adjustment due to Blizzard's "greed".
A new "Keep Cards drafted" option could appear in Arena, where you can permanently keep the cards you draft in your arena deck. Blizzard may want to attach an extra 500 gold fee or something, but it could be an interesting way to get cards you don't own. It would be a great incentive coz of the rotating sets in Arena every few months and you could collect wild and standard cards. Ofc, that would incentivize you to pick only cards you don't own instead of making a decent deck, but you wouldn't really feel bad at the end of the run coz you'd have collected a bunch of new cards anyway. There'd have to be some UI changes ofc, like a glowing boarder around cards you don't own.
Hearthstone's Arena Mode Could Potentially See Updates Next Year Thanks to Blizzard's Annual "Free Your Mind" Event
Yep, just like Runeterra. Hearthstone implemented the Tavern Tickets years ago before Runeterra existed, but I know on at least one occasion - pre Rewards-track - I was supposed to have multiple, but I was only able to cash one in. It wasn't tracked anywhere in the client that I could see as a player. I expected them to get more formalized when they started offering them in the Rewards Track, but it's still this quasi-feature that's also easily confused with the Tavern Pass and the Battlegrounds Perks (which offer Tavern Tickets). Formalizing it would be so easy, and put them on par with their main competitor, but instead we get vague hints that Cora might work on something as an individual around Christmas when she should otherwise be taking vacation. For her sake, I'd rather have her go on vacation. Have it be a team priority for the game, not a passion project.
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
Given what the most recent changes have been like, I'm not hopeful. It's nice they're at least finally acknowledging the problem after two patches of doing nothing to address it, but given how meek and minute the changes have been, I'm fairly confident that out of the 6+ cards that need changing in Warlock alone, barely half of them is going to get addressed. And who knows how many of the changes that do make it through actually achieve what was intended. And that's just talking about Warlock. I think it's safe to say even if Warlock takes a galactic nerfing the meta won't be any more favourable to control than it is right now, since Shamans, Mages, Hunters and potentially Paladins will take over the mantle and quest control into oblivion.
Everything You Need to Know About Hearthstone's Mercenaries Game Mode
I'm going to need to see more of the mercenaries before I decide if I wanna play
if they have Rafaam or the other league of EVIL members that'd be too tempting to pass up
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
Here are just a couple reasons that explain why you're wrong:
Wild already has very little balance changes per year: at least let them be as impactful as possible!
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
I'm sure we'll finally see warlock demon seed get nerfed, I just think fundamentally circumventing the fatigue mechanic is what is making it broken. I have a feeling that we'll see a change to how tamsin interacts with fatigue, but we'll have to wait and see how things flesh out...
Hearthstone's Mercenaries Debut Stream - Everything New We've Learned About the Mode Releasing in October
It's been an active hobby and I'm an adult with a stable job so I don't exactly begrudge the $50 I spent every few months. But it's objectively a steep price to pay for what we're getting, and I genuinely think we're getting less and less each expansion. After the final balance patch during Barrens I actually thought the Standard meta was in a fantastic place. But it took literal months. And then United in Stormwind completely ruined the meta again. This has been a consistent cycle of them not play-testing or balancing OBVIOUS broken cards before releasing a set. What if, for example, instead of putting intensive resources into a new game (not a mode), they put that energy into the back-end so they could patch/alter the game on the fly much easier? Having each nerf cycle take a month simply isn't fun, especially when they don't usually get it right on the first try.
Hearthstone's Arena Mode Could Potentially See Updates Next Year Thanks to Blizzard's Annual "Free Your Mind" Event
This sounds eerily similar to Legends of Runeterra. Weekly chests, that upon earning enough weekly experience, gives you an expedition token (the equivalent of a tavern ticket.) Which I would approve of. I think casual duels should go bye-bye and as long as duels is a supported and balanced mode, heroic duels should just be...duels. We should get a tavern ticket with our weekly "win 5 ranked games" quest.
Also we should be getting slightly more rewards in general since the new mercenaries mode apparently is going to be stretching gold resources even thinner.
Hearthstone's Arena Mode Could Potentially See Updates Next Year Thanks to Blizzard's Annual "Free Your Mind" Event
Without much work they could 1) Make Tavern Tickets an official in-game currency. 2) Award 1 free Tavern Ticket per week for completing a quest or objective (i.e. complete 2 weekly quests to earn it). For the last several cycles I've been so focused on saving up 2000 gold for the mini-set, that I don't spend my gold on Arena like I used to. They need greater rewards all around, but the two changes above would go a long way towards creating the interest and player base again for Arena and Heroic Duels (I think Casual Duels should be eliminated with easier ways to earn Tavern Tickets).
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
It would be a massive chore to work out the balance though because the amount of damage you actually do to yourself becomes hidden behind the statistics of what 'hurting yourself X times' actually means. Is it as small as X damage? Or is it closer to 3X, or even 5X? So I doubt they'd want to rework it that way.
Better just to change the wording of Crystallizer to convert your health into armour like High Priest Thekal does (with an appropriate mechanical change in the code too). That way Crystallizer doesn't actually deal damage to you, and no longer violates the balance of the card because you actually have to deal 6+7+8-2*3=15 damage to yourself.
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
yeah i agree.. instead of progressing the quest 5/6 with a single Crystallizer (with no drawback), they can make it like 'deal damage to urself 3/4/5 times' or sth.
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
I mean... we know it's easy to say this from an amateur game-designer perspective.. but if Warlock quest would count times of dealt damage instead of actual damage it could easily be balanced. Like for example if it said: Deal damage to your hero 5 times to progress etc...
Sure the final reward is crazy strong still but at least it would be a start...
Shaman Quest works the same way. It doesn't count overloaded crystals but the frequency of your overload.
A man can dream... (which Blizzard is obviously doing too lol)
Hearthstone is Looking at Possible Nerfs and Buffs in the September Balance Patch, Wild Balance May be Coming
I don't know if I should be grateful that they acknowledge the situation in Wild at all or appalled as we have to endure another month of this shit meta. Probably the latter. Nerfing a single card should not take that long.
A New Hearthstone Puzzle Card Back "Gift of Elune" Has Been Added - Solve the Mysteries of Stormwind
I had the exact same observations as you did and I have also no clue whatsoever what needs to be done to solve the second puzzle. Perhaps the WOW Secrets team had more luck in figuring things out and report back to us with hopefully good news. Seems like this puzzle is slight more complex even when compared to the first one because it has been quite silent since the server hotfix went live.
A New Hearthstone Puzzle Card Back "Gift of Elune" Has Been Added - Solve the Mysteries of Stormwind
Anybody make progress on the 2nd puzzle yet?
You get a board full of minions of different tribes on one side, and on your side a single mystery minion flanked by two copies of the opposing minions that seem to be selected randomly and change everytime the puzzle resets.
You have a hand full of cards that you can use on the mystery minion. Each one represents a different tribe. The first time you use a card on the mystery minion it transforms into a 0/1 minion of that tribe (not related to the opposing minions though). After that you can play 6 more cards before the puzzle resets again. These add a digit to the minion's stat values, corresponding to their position in hand (left to right, 1-9, then 0).
Literally 0 idea what is going on there. Tried to transform it into a matching tribe to copy the statlines of the flanking minions, but that does nothing. Tried some adding and subtracting numbers, but that also lead nowhere.