and it remains to be seen if we will still be given the customary free legendary on expansion launch. If not, the free legendary on the rewards track is not extra but rather instead of. Perhaps that detail has already been announced and I missed it (more than possible).
As always cannot start my own Fireside Gathering due to 404 errors. Been happening for over a year now and a ticket to Blizz last expansion didn't help either. *Sigh*
Though it's good he's engaging with the community feedback, I am somewhat dismayed at his 2 examples.
5 hours - nearly a third of our waking life playing Hearthstone every single day without fail? Streamers maybe, or people running bots.
Even 1 hour per day is more than many people play, whereas before they could simply play 3/6 games win or lose in casual every 2 or 3 days and net over 7200g and rank/arena/bg if/when they wished as time permitted.
This is directly counter to what was promised. Hopefully it will be addressed especially as the game became a lot more expensive due to 3 extra mini-expacs a year.
You should earn more total rewards than before. Leaving out certain XP sources hurts the math.
See my problem with this quote alone is that the moment I have every rare and common in a set, packs in that set are no longer equivalent to gold in my eyes, as I'm frequently just given 40 dust for them
I would rather save 2000 gold for the next expansion to continue having every rare and common instead of being forced to swap it for 800 dust...
This is excluding the fact that one reward is just "have an epic", and another is "have a card back"
Also, side note, with their math they provided, they try to make a whole 2 legendaries and 1 epic seem good by not saying those numbers directly, they call it "a slew of legendary and epic cards"
Don't let the "New and improved" advertising blind you into thinking this system is good
Worst will be the last 10 levels. Imagine doing level 48, grinding the 9000 xp for a week and as a reward getting 1 (one) cardpack from Last year with cards remaining in standard for few weeks. Cool.
I am one of the players who complains that it's significantly less gold, for more effort, despite a clear assurance this would not be the case. In point of fact I felt I had to retire my NA and Asia accounts that would easily garner 7260g for little effort that now will not but playing on them would hurt my main EU account.
And this alongside a time when the game is not only made more expensive with 3 extra mini-expacs a year, but you'll need to buy packs at a time one would typically be saving up (our now reduced) gold for the next expansion.
Additionally it may be the 800XP quests are weighted. Certainly my first 3 were all 800XP. That might just be unlucky - this will be clearer over time.
Lots of nice things they've added to the game, but this feels bad. Let's hope they do indeed twiddle the knobs at the backend to resolve.
I just wish Weekly Quests weren't based on specific modes, especially on performances in specific modes.
Like, I'm not going to spend hours trying to get 2nd in a BG or wasting gold to finish Arena runs with 4 wins...
The concept of the track is great tho. I'm almost more excited about it than about the incoming expansion. As long as it is properly tuned about gold gains per playtime.
You will definitely find players who stop at 6900g < 8400g and argue all the extra stuff can be ignored because Blizz specifically said we'd get just as much gold AND get extras on top. Even if Blizz hadn't said that, the argument that 1500g is worth more than 15 packs still holds up.
I myself am pretty neutral. I'm not an Arena player and don't plan on being a Herioc Duels player, so 100g = 1 pack to me, and if I'm honest the differences in which packs I use them on are negligible. By which I mean, I currently stop buying packs more or less on day 1 so any gold I earn is used for the next expansion, but in the long run that expansion's rewards would still give me those packs anyway, albeit with a bit of delay. That delay might not even be a bad thing with how min-expansions are going to work.
So to me, if all the numbers add up such that I'm not worse off, and there is a hero skin to get at the end, then I'm content with it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the more interesting milestones encourage me to play a little more, so I might end up getting more gold just because I'm more engaged with it.
I only remember Ivory Knight seeing play back in the day with Anyfin Paladin as 1) that deck was desperate for healing and 2) it allowed for getting an extra copy of Anyfin Can Happen. Of course, Snack Run has the weakness of secrets reducing your choices, but maybe Libram Paladins want potentially efficient ways to find more librams? I think that archetype has more efficient plays than this, as well as having great healing with Libram of Hope, but there might be a chance of this being a tech inclusion.
This is definitely one of the better Paladin secrets out there, acting as a 1 mana Counterspell most of the time. The issue some of the power behind secrets is the uncertainty your opponent has when multiple secrets exist in the deck. The only exception to this is Mage, in which the defensive secrets don't require a full secret package due to their standalone effect. Paladin doesn't have a great secret package in standard currently, it's mainly Rise of Shadows cards like Commander Rhyssa, Mysterious Blade, and Sunreaver Spy, all of which will rotate out soon. Once Paladin gets substantial secret support in standard, this will see play.
It's worded perfectly fine. It uses the same transforming mechanic, but it doesn't actually change the result based on Cost. The Evolve effect strictly relies to transforming minions into ones of different costs.
The concern here about the cost of the mini set is certainly valid, but I can't help but wonder how important the set will be in terms of the game's economics. Using Galakrond's Awakening as the template for rarity distribution, it seems like the mini set will mostly be made up of common and rare cards. Thanks to duplicate protection, it should take only a small number of extra packs to gather up those common and rare cards cards, and then you can use dust to create any missing epic or legendary card that happens to be relevant to the metagame. Most of the high-rarity cards from that mini set were good in certain archetypes, but were never meta-defining, so I'm not really worried that the incremental cost will be all that high from a practical standpoint.
I have a few doubts about the new system as well, but I'm not ready to freak out just yet. I know Blizz had their calculations and a lot of players have their own calculations. I'm kind of in a "wait and see" mode. They have guaranteed we should receive the same or more rewards, so if we don't then I'm hopeful they will make adjustments and possibly even BOOST XP for the second half or so of the expansion to help everyone catch back up to expected levels.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but if they did overestimate how much people could earn, and then don't follow through on their promises, then they are choosing to kill the game by chasing away players after broken promises. So again, would expect them to make those changes and offer some sort of apology gift to keep a high revenue game like Hearthstone going strong.
First a correction: that is the experience to the NEXT level, so the halving happens just after you reach level 50.
It's very likely intentional yes. Everything up to level 50 is the main part, where you have the big carrot of the choice of hero skin dangling in front of you, meaning you won't mind the large gaps between levels. I'd even guess there's a psychological effect where it feels like you earned it more.
Everything after that, though, is just gold. It would feel much more frustrating to have such a large gap because the rewards aren't exciting. Plus, you'll note it gives 150 gold in about half the XP it gives 300 gold in levels 45-50, so the rate of gold acquisition is kept the same.
We'll see how things play out in the next 4 months, but they don't look promising right now.
I don't play ranked, play pretty casually, play my quests and a little bit more, and have saved 9000 gold since the last expansion. If the new system nets me around 5400 gold for the same effort, I'm going to be down over 30 packs come the next expansion.
I already buy the mega bundle each expansion, on top of all the packs I buy with gold, and still end up with a substantial amount of legendaries missing each expansion.
I'm already reluctant to keep on spending $240 a year on a game I play casually. I'm definitely not going to spend $40 more per expansion to make up for lost gold.
This isn't even considering 35-card sets released between expansions. The game is already way too expensive in regard to what you get for your money, and, considering the fact that you have a game with limited functionality even if you spend as much as I do, there's no way I'm going to keep on playing if I buy mega bundles and 35-card sets and am missing even more cards than I am missing now.
Of course, I'll wait until the next expansion and see where my gold's at. The cost of the game isn't justifiable, but I keep spending money on it because I like it, but there are limits.
I've probably spent over $2000 on the game over the past 6 years. (I spent more heavily in the beginning to get up to speed.) Which is kind of ridiculous, especially when you consider that you start with a partially-functional game and participate in a lottery system to add random functionality to the game for a comparatively high cost. Referring to the process as 'buying packs' is an illusion, since no real cards exist and you're simply spending a lot of money to gain little bit of added functionality while hoping to get the bits you want the most.
Like I said, I put up with the illusion because I want to play the game, but my playing the game will not survive if the rewards become less, considering that I already feel like a bit of a sucker playing things under the way that they've been.
Maybe things will work out. We will have to see. As for my observations about the cost of the game, I'm not criticizing anyone who chooses to spend money on the game. Obviously, I'm one of those people. But I do it with some reluctance, so I'll have to see if this makes the game more expensive or not and decide from there.
Agreed. This has truly brought out the whiniest fans of Hearthstone. It's exhausting. The worst part is: literally none of them will ever apologize once it becomes apparent they were wrong.
I counted all Darkmoon Faire achievements, just being curious what is easily achievable for F2P player. I didn't count DF achievements which require specific Legendary card to complete.
The result is - 7800XP, which is about 50% of total 14800 XP. So yes, you don't get much really.
Duels achievements are probably one-time only, so, I don't count them.
Some of the achievements are very specific tho, which means you probably won't complete them without trying to meet the requirements... but that's probably a good thing, who would like achievements to be laughably easy? I can't wait to see how many people will try to complete Darkmoon Rabbit achievements :D
They said the same or better *rewards* as before. If you're only counting gold, you're doing a foolish, facile calculation in bad faith just because you're angry about the change.
Guys...everyone needs to take a deep breath. There is almost no difference from before for a player that completes all his quests, plays about an hour a day and puts minimal effort into achievements. If anything we come out slightly ahead, despite all the howls of rage on Reddit from people that aren't great at math (God bless em). Allow me to explain:
Previous system: Completing a 60 gold quest every day, playing about an hour a day and earning 10 gold a day from wins on average gets you 70 gold per day. Over 120 days that's 8400 gold. That's the number we're comparing to.
New System -
Daily Quests: Some people say we'll get 900 daily XP on average. I don't agree. There are ones that give 1500 XP and there are many more 1000 ones than 800 ones. I think 1000 is a better estimate. So that's 120,000 XP for all daily quests over the 120 days of an expansion.
Weekly quests: This is a set number: 102,000 XP for completing all over 17 weeks.
Achievements: No way most people are getting all the achievements but some will come without even trying and I think most people will look at them and try to get some XP from some. We're comparing this to not having to do anything before so whatever number goes here has to be from casual effort into it and even having a bit of fun with it. We can't be sure but I think it's reasonable to think you can get to 10,000 (out of the 27,300 XP available) before you start grinding.
Play time: Players are already experiencing XP gains that are under the the 400 XP/hour so maybe 350 XP/hour is closer to what we're getting. At an hour a day over 120 days that's 42,000 for play time over the expansion.
Add it all up: 120,000 + 102,000 + 10,000 + 42,000 gets you 274,000. That's 1000 XP from level 68. That's within a reasonable margin of error so let's just say playing about an hour a day, completing all quests, and putting mild effort into achievements you get to level 68 before the battle pass expires. That gets you 6900 gold. That's 4,200 from levels 1-50 and 2,700 from 51-68.
6900 gold is 1500 less than the 8400 gold we would have got before. So is what we're getting in the battle pass worth 15 packs? Let's look at it.
We get 16 card packs (7 Darkmoon), 2 tavern tickets (worth a pack each), 2 Darkmoon legendaries and 1 Darkmoon epic. Subtract the 6 free packs we're not getting from legendary quests, subtract the legendary we're not getting free when the expansion starts, count the tickets as packs, and we're left with 12 packs, 1 legendary and 1 epic. So we have 12 packs that are divided between different expansions and thus not getting us a good chance at legendaries BUT we get a free legendary. One legendary out of the 15 packs we would have had in the old system would have been great (and there's a chance to pull one from the 12 packs) so we're actually in better shape for legendaries. We're kind of even on epics (rolling from 12 packs instead of 15, mostly from old expansions...but then add the free one from Darkmoon). And what's left is: we're down 3 packs (unless you did well with those tickets). For that we get to choose a hero skin.
So that grinds down to a really small difference in my eyes. Please break down my logic if you can but the numbers don't lie. We end up in basically the same situation if not slightly better off.
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
and it remains to be seen if we will still be given the customary free legendary on expansion launch. If not, the free legendary on the rewards track is not extra but rather instead of. Perhaps that detail has already been announced and I missed it (more than possible).
Darkmoon Faire Fireside Gatherings & Pre-Release Event This Weekend - Opening Your Packs Early
As always cannot start my own Fireside Gathering due to 404 errors. Been happening for over a year now and a ticket to Blizz last expansion didn't help either. *Sigh*
The Concepts and Progress of Hearthstone's Sideshow Glow & N'Zoth Card Backs by Tiffany Chiu
Her work is amazing! Here is an avocado toast card back that she did, which no doubt helped her land the job!
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
Though it's good he's engaging with the community feedback, I am somewhat dismayed at his 2 examples.
5 hours - nearly a third of our waking life playing Hearthstone every single day without fail? Streamers maybe, or people running bots.
Even 1 hour per day is more than many people play, whereas before they could simply play 3/6 games win or lose in casual every 2 or 3 days and net over 7200g and rank/arena/bg if/when they wished as time permitted.
This is directly counter to what was promised. Hopefully it will be addressed especially as the game became a lot more expensive due to 3 extra mini-expacs a year.
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
See my problem with this quote alone is that the moment I have every rare and common in a set, packs in that set are no longer equivalent to gold in my eyes, as I'm frequently just given 40 dust for them
I would rather save 2000 gold for the next expansion to continue having every rare and common instead of being forced to swap it for 800 dust...
This is excluding the fact that one reward is just "have an epic", and another is "have a card back"
Also, side note, with their math they provided, they try to make a whole 2 legendaries and 1 epic seem good by not saying those numbers directly, they call it "a slew of legendary and epic cards"
Don't let the "New and improved" advertising blind you into thinking this system is good
Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate
"Even competive Hearthstone must die!"
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
Worst will be the last 10 levels. Imagine doing level 48, grinding the 9000 xp for a week and as a reward getting 1 (one) cardpack from Last year with cards remaining in standard for few weeks. Cool.
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
I am one of the players who complains that it's significantly less gold, for more effort, despite a clear assurance this would not be the case. In point of fact I felt I had to retire my NA and Asia accounts that would easily garner 7260g for little effort that now will not but playing on them would hurt my main EU account.
And this alongside a time when the game is not only made more expensive with 3 extra mini-expacs a year, but you'll need to buy packs at a time one would typically be saving up (our now reduced) gold for the next expansion.
Additionally it may be the 800XP quests are weighted. Certainly my first 3 were all 800XP. That might just be unlucky - this will be clearer over time.
Lots of nice things they've added to the game, but this feels bad. Let's hope they do indeed twiddle the knobs at the backend to resolve.
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
I just wish Weekly Quests weren't based on specific modes, especially on performances in specific modes.
Like, I'm not going to spend hours trying to get 2nd in a BG or wasting gold to finish Arena runs with 4 wins...
The concept of the track is great tho. I'm almost more excited about it than about the incoming expansion. As long as it is properly tuned about gold gains per playtime.
What Free Legendary did you get?
Also got Zai, the Incredible,
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
You will definitely find players who stop at 6900g < 8400g and argue all the extra stuff can be ignored because Blizz specifically said we'd get just as much gold AND get extras on top. Even if Blizz hadn't said that, the argument that 1500g is worth more than 15 packs still holds up.
I myself am pretty neutral. I'm not an Arena player and don't plan on being a Herioc Duels player, so 100g = 1 pack to me, and if I'm honest the differences in which packs I use them on are negligible. By which I mean, I currently stop buying packs more or less on day 1 so any gold I earn is used for the next expansion, but in the long run that expansion's rewards would still give me those packs anyway, albeit with a bit of delay. That delay might not even be a bad thing with how min-expansions are going to work.
So to me, if all the numbers add up such that I'm not worse off, and there is a hero skin to get at the end, then I'm content with it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the more interesting milestones encourage me to play a little more, so I might end up getting more gold just because I'm more engaged with it.
New Paladin Spell - Snack Run
I only remember Ivory Knight seeing play back in the day with Anyfin Paladin as 1) that deck was desperate for healing and 2) it allowed for getting an extra copy of Anyfin Can Happen. Of course, Snack Run has the weakness of secrets reducing your choices, but maybe Libram Paladins want potentially efficient ways to find more librams? I think that archetype has more efficient plays than this, as well as having great healing with Libram of Hope, but there might be a chance of this being a tech inclusion.
New Paladin Spell - Oh My Yogg!
This is definitely one of the better Paladin secrets out there, acting as a 1 mana Counterspell most of the time. The issue some of the power behind secrets is the uncertainty your opponent has when multiple secrets exist in the deck. The only exception to this is Mage, in which the defensive secrets don't require a full secret package due to their standalone effect. Paladin doesn't have a great secret package in standard currently, it's mainly Rise of Shadows cards like Commander Rhyssa, Mysterious Blade, and Sunreaver Spy, all of which will rotate out soon. Once Paladin gets substantial secret support in standard, this will see play.
Madness at the Darkmoon Faire - Reveal Season Community Bingo
It's worded perfectly fine. It uses the same transforming mechanic, but it doesn't actually change the result based on Cost. The Evolve effect strictly relies to transforming minions into ones of different costs.
The Rewards Track - How Long to Get to Level 50, 644000 Experience Required to Get to Level 150
The concern here about the cost of the mini set is certainly valid, but I can't help but wonder how important the set will be in terms of the game's economics. Using Galakrond's Awakening as the template for rarity distribution, it seems like the mini set will mostly be made up of common and rare cards. Thanks to duplicate protection, it should take only a small number of extra packs to gather up those common and rare cards cards, and then you can use dust to create any missing epic or legendary card that happens to be relevant to the metagame. Most of the high-rarity cards from that mini set were good in certain archetypes, but were never meta-defining, so I'm not really worried that the incremental cost will be all that high from a practical standpoint.
Madness at the Darkmoon Faire - Reveal Season Community Bingo
But it's the same mechanic of transforming minions based on their cost. The bingo sheet slot should have been better worded IMO
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
I have a few doubts about the new system as well, but I'm not ready to freak out just yet. I know Blizz had their calculations and a lot of players have their own calculations. I'm kind of in a "wait and see" mode. They have guaranteed we should receive the same or more rewards, so if we don't then I'm hopeful they will make adjustments and possibly even BOOST XP for the second half or so of the expansion to help everyone catch back up to expected levels.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but if they did overestimate how much people could earn, and then don't follow through on their promises, then they are choosing to kill the game by chasing away players after broken promises. So again, would expect them to make those changes and offer some sort of apology gift to keep a high revenue game like Hearthstone going strong.
The Rewards Track - How Long to Get to Level 50, 644000 Experience Required to Get to Level 150
First a correction: that is the experience to the NEXT level, so the halving happens just after you reach level 50.
It's very likely intentional yes. Everything up to level 50 is the main part, where you have the big carrot of the choice of hero skin dangling in front of you, meaning you won't mind the large gaps between levels. I'd even guess there's a psychological effect where it feels like you earned it more.
Everything after that, though, is just gold. It would feel much more frustrating to have such a large gap because the rewards aren't exciting. Plus, you'll note it gives 150 gold in about half the XP it gives 300 gold in levels 45-50, so the rate of gold acquisition is kept the same.
A Wild Hearthstone Weekend Featuring Menagerie Paladin, Silas OTK Warrior, Highlander Hunter, and More!
I never saw that dragon-riding lady up close before until this thumbnail and I must say I hate it
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
We'll see how things play out in the next 4 months, but they don't look promising right now.
I don't play ranked, play pretty casually, play my quests and a little bit more, and have saved 9000 gold since the last expansion. If the new system nets me around 5400 gold for the same effort, I'm going to be down over 30 packs come the next expansion.
I already buy the mega bundle each expansion, on top of all the packs I buy with gold, and still end up with a substantial amount of legendaries missing each expansion.
I'm already reluctant to keep on spending $240 a year on a game I play casually. I'm definitely not going to spend $40 more per expansion to make up for lost gold.
This isn't even considering 35-card sets released between expansions. The game is already way too expensive in regard to what you get for your money, and, considering the fact that you have a game with limited functionality even if you spend as much as I do, there's no way I'm going to keep on playing if I buy mega bundles and 35-card sets and am missing even more cards than I am missing now.
Of course, I'll wait until the next expansion and see where my gold's at. The cost of the game isn't justifiable, but I keep spending money on it because I like it, but there are limits.
I've probably spent over $2000 on the game over the past 6 years. (I spent more heavily in the beginning to get up to speed.) Which is kind of ridiculous, especially when you consider that you start with a partially-functional game and participate in a lottery system to add random functionality to the game for a comparatively high cost. Referring to the process as 'buying packs' is an illusion, since no real cards exist and you're simply spending a lot of money to gain little bit of added functionality while hoping to get the bits you want the most.
Like I said, I put up with the illusion because I want to play the game, but my playing the game will not survive if the rewards become less, considering that I already feel like a bit of a sucker playing things under the way that they've been.
Maybe things will work out. We will have to see. As for my observations about the cost of the game, I'm not criticizing anyone who chooses to spend money on the game. Obviously, I'm one of those people. But I do it with some reluctance, so I'll have to see if this makes the game more expensive or not and decide from there.
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
Agreed. This has truly brought out the whiniest fans of Hearthstone. It's exhausting. The worst part is: literally none of them will ever apologize once it becomes apparent they were wrong.
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
I counted all Darkmoon Faire achievements, just being curious what is easily achievable for F2P player. I didn't count DF achievements which require specific Legendary card to complete.
The result is - 7800 XP, which is about 50% of total 14800 XP. So yes, you don't get much really.
Duels achievements are probably one-time only, so, I don't count them.
Some of the achievements are very specific tho, which means you probably won't complete them without trying to meet the requirements... but that's probably a good thing, who would like achievements to be laughably easy? I can't wait to see how many people will try to complete Darkmoon Rabbit achievements :D
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
They said the same or better *rewards* as before. If you're only counting gold, you're doing a foolish, facile calculation in bad faith just because you're angry about the change.
Blizzard Responds to Hearthstone Battle Pass Experience Concerns
Guys...everyone needs to take a deep breath. There is almost no difference from before for a player that completes all his quests, plays about an hour a day and puts minimal effort into achievements. If anything we come out slightly ahead, despite all the howls of rage on Reddit from people that aren't great at math (God bless em). Allow me to explain:
Previous system: Completing a 60 gold quest every day, playing about an hour a day and earning 10 gold a day from wins on average gets you 70 gold per day. Over 120 days that's 8400 gold. That's the number we're comparing to.
New System -
Daily Quests: Some people say we'll get 900 daily XP on average. I don't agree. There are ones that give 1500 XP and there are many more 1000 ones than 800 ones. I think 1000 is a better estimate. So that's 120,000 XP for all daily quests over the 120 days of an expansion.
Weekly quests: This is a set number: 102,000 XP for completing all over 17 weeks.
Achievements: No way most people are getting all the achievements but some will come without even trying and I think most people will look at them and try to get some XP from some. We're comparing this to not having to do anything before so whatever number goes here has to be from casual effort into it and even having a bit of fun with it. We can't be sure but I think it's reasonable to think you can get to 10,000 (out of the 27,300 XP available) before you start grinding.
Play time: Players are already experiencing XP gains that are under the the 400 XP/hour so maybe 350 XP/hour is closer to what we're getting. At an hour a day over 120 days that's 42,000 for play time over the expansion.
Add it all up: 120,000 + 102,000 + 10,000 + 42,000 gets you 274,000. That's 1000 XP from level 68. That's within a reasonable margin of error so let's just say playing about an hour a day, completing all quests, and putting mild effort into achievements you get to level 68 before the battle pass expires. That gets you 6900 gold. That's 4,200 from levels 1-50 and 2,700 from 51-68.
6900 gold is 1500 less than the 8400 gold we would have got before. So is what we're getting in the battle pass worth 15 packs? Let's look at it.
We get 16 card packs (7 Darkmoon), 2 tavern tickets (worth a pack each), 2 Darkmoon legendaries and 1 Darkmoon epic. Subtract the 6 free packs we're not getting from legendary quests, subtract the legendary we're not getting free when the expansion starts, count the tickets as packs, and we're left with 12 packs, 1 legendary and 1 epic. So we have 12 packs that are divided between different expansions and thus not getting us a good chance at legendaries BUT we get a free legendary. One legendary out of the 15 packs we would have had in the old system would have been great (and there's a chance to pull one from the 12 packs) so we're actually in better shape for legendaries. We're kind of even on epics (rolling from 12 packs instead of 15, mostly from old expansions...but then add the free one from Darkmoon). And what's left is: we're down 3 packs (unless you did well with those tickets). For that we get to choose a hero skin.
So that grinds down to a really small difference in my eyes. Please break down my logic if you can but the numbers don't lie. We end up in basically the same situation if not slightly better off.