While there are a lot of things you can do as a user to promote your decks, this is one area where I feel the site itself could be improved a great deal: at the moment the forums feel a bit isolated from other sections of the site like news and decks/guides, where discussion might occur as well. It seems to me that having a new deck or news item post as a forum thread would direct more traffic towards them and encourage more discussion/interaction from people who might not otherwise see that content.
A handy rule for triggered effects is to always check whether they occur "when(ever)" or "after" they occur. A "when(ever)"-trigger occurs immediately, prior to the thing that triggers it (Explosive Trap, Vaporize), an "after"-trigger occurs after the event that triggered it(Rat Trap, Flame Ward).
That said, when in doubt it's always worth testing weird interactions, especially with cards that are worded in an unusual way, because Hearthstone isn't the most consistent of games and brevity is often chosen over specificity.
I was wondering if you guys could add "Quest" and "Secret" to the list of card types in the search engine. They're sufficiently different from other spells to warrant a separate filter and especially the latter would be pretty useful considering the number of secrets in existence as well as the fact that dedicated secret decks are a regular occurrence in wild and standard alike.
What? They literally have to do nothing to keep him up to date. He simply uses the deck recipes that are in the game since day one and are getting updated since the very first expansion
If doesn't matter if they could, they are not going to. If they were going to, then why print Zayle, Shadow Cloak which effectively does the same but shuffles out of Standard on another year?
They want those cards to have a limited lifespan, it's part of their intended design.
It matters a great deal if that's the reason you presented for Blizzard not moving Whizzbang. If you want to change your argument now that it's been refuted, that's fine, but at least have the decency to acknowledge you were wrong before shifting those goalposts.
I don't think you can reasonably distinguish "rarity creep" from power creep, it's part of the same process. Obviously if the average power level goes up over time, the amount of power you can expect from any given rarity will go up as well, to the point where today's commons might look like yesteryear's legendaries. That said, Maexxna was never a particularly powerful or exciting card, even when she was first introduced, so I have no problem whatsoever with a common card stealing her very very bland, vanilla thunder. If anything, Maexxna was a bad legendary, even back in the day: Sure, poisonous wasn't a keyword yet, but she was still effectively a fatter, more expensive Emperor Cobra.
As fr the issue of neutral legendaries, I for one am glad that they're no longer the most dominant force in HS as it would make deckbuilding incredibly stale and repetitive. It's bad enough that Zilliax goes into virtually every deck, the last thing I'd want is more auto-include neutral legendaries. I wouldn't mind seeing more decks that don't explicitly require a class legendary though.
IMO Uldum was just the first example of the class identity memo negatively impacting HS card design, with more to follow. I've heard that Plague of Madness was a last-minute change from an actual board clear because the devs belatedly realised that rogue's not allowed to have mass removal.
Publishing the class identity document was a totally unforced error on Blizzard's part: they could have just not posted the damn thing in a transparent attempt to rationalise their hall of fame decisions, but instead they gave everyone unlimited ammo to criticise any and all future choices by the developers, either for following the memo too strictly or for straying from it.
to be fair, if any of the other plagues are an indication, then Rogue having an AoE in any comparable form would be bad for the game in the long run...or it would just end up being useless because Rogue still doesn't get taunt or heals and needs to maintain board presence to beat aggression.
Also the dev team has been much more communicative lately so maybe they just wanted to get it out there to get some feedback...which should lead them to dropping this whole class identity BS and just design cards that give classes different option for building specific decks (like card draw in Hunter via Master'S Call and Subject 9 or card draw for Shaman via Spirit of the Frog)
I disagree. For one, it seems to me one of the main benefits of having evergreen and rotating sets is that you can have deviant cards in the latter because they rotate out anyway, EG Conjurer's Calling for mage or Hagatha the Witch for shaman. What's more, it's not as if all of the remaining plagues are equally powerful, for example the warlock plague is pretty weak and situational. They could have made a similar card for rogue that returns all friendly minions to hand and bounces a random enemy minion for each friendly returned in this way; I doubt that would have been much of a balance concern and it would have at least lived up to the idea of a board clear cycle for all of the villain classes.
I understand team 5 wanting to be more responsive and open, and I think that's a good idea in general, but to me the class identity document seemed more like an ass-pull to explain away the rather abrupt and arbitrary HoF-ing of Vanish and Mind Blast. If you just take it as a loose guideline then it doesn't explain the urgency in removing those cards, whereas if you take it as a hard set of rules then they've already broken their promise in the very next set they released after explaining their policy. I think they were open, but less than honest with the memo, and now they're stuck in their contradictions and frantically altering design decisions after-the-fact rather than just admitting that maybe the class identity thing was a poor choice, or at least poorly communicated.
It's a bad card. If you're going to include an understatted silence guy gal to answer key enemy minions you might as well have that be a minion that can silence anything, not just taunts.
Even if shieldbreaker had a fair statline, that is to say, 2/3 or 3/2, the fact that it can only silence enemy taunts is a huge detriment to the card as a tech inclusion. You might run it as a "real" card in aggro lists though if it were a river croc with potential upside, but it isn't.
I don't know if most players were hyped about this back when RR came out, but if they were, they were wrong. Shieldbreaker is no prenerf Ironbeak Owl, not even close.
IMO Uldum was just the first example of the class identity memo negatively impacting HS card design, with more to follow. I've heard that Plague of Madness was a last-minute change from an actual board clear because the devs belatedly realised that rogue's not allowed to have mass removal.
Publishing the class identity document was a totally unforced error on Blizzard's part: they could have just not posted the damn thing in a transparent attempt to rationalise their hall of fame decisions, but instead they gave everyone unlimited ammo to criticise any and all future choices by the developers, either for following the memo too strictly or for straying from it.
I'd wager it's due to the sleep mechanic being based on summoning sickness. Otherwise you'd be able to give any minion charge by silencing them the turn they're played.
I know mage excels in AOE, but sometimes you need a real board clear. Now the question is, why does mage has no board clear while other classes do. I can create some 2/3 card combo which should clear the board, say a 6 damage to all minions. But his does not clear a board of mountain giants for instance, or one 24/24 mech.
Mage's removal spells are almost without exception damage (and/or freeze) based, that's the class's flavour. What little single target hard removal exists in the class typically requires the target to be frozen already.
As for why other classes regularly get good AoE clears and mage doesn't, it's because of mage's evergreen card pool, which contains flamestrike, blizzard, frost nova and cone of cold. If you want to see better mage AoE, petition blizzard to HoF some more mage spells or better yet, change the rotation system to somehow include evergreen sets. Considering how strong the basic mage cards are I'm genuinely surprised mage even got the AoE it did this set, especially since it shores up the major weakness of secret mage which is already a viable (and incredibly irritating) wild deck.
If there is a "downvote effect" it's people's tendency to express themselves once they've seen a sufficient number of others do the same. If a post gets more than say 3 up/downvotes it will tend to accumulate these even if it's not a spectacularly good or bad post.
That said I don't think you can really draw any inferences from people's voting habits to if/how they otherwise express themselves. For all you know some people are more inclined to post a critical reply once they see it's "safe" by the fact that the rest of the forum has already nuked the OP with downvotes.
It's bizarre and completely counter-intuitive for those 1/1 tokens not to become 4/4 the minute they hit the board. I'm pretty sure they're not doing this for balance purposes, so who in their right mind thinks this is more intuitive or easy to understand?
Your reasoning is also binary, on the opposite side, by exaggeration.
Salt was added to the water, but still drinkable. You are attaching the fact it is undrinkable by implying that salty is too salty. But that's your opinion. If we agree on not agreeing it is actually too salty, then your suggestions about diluting the water with more water are just a subjective point.
No I'm not. I'm really really not. I'm explicitly making a relative argument. The amount of reaching and adding on assumptions you had to do to turn a straightforward example of something being relative (less or more salty) into a binary (somehow?) is astonishing. Why do you persist with this? Do you genuinely not understand what I'm saying? Just answer the question: Which is MORE salty, a glass of clean water or a glass of water with 1 spoon of salt? This isn't a trick question.
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Let me reformulate this way: Odd/Even mechanic is slightly more repetitive than normal, yet not enough to deserve any sorts of alterations.
It's definitely not as repetitive as you depict it, by far.
There's still plenty of decision-making in the form of each card that requires to be played. And guess what? Odd/Even decks play the same number of cards as any other decks in the game.
Having an improved HP essentially means that the starting question for your turn ought to be "Do I want to press the button?", and you need a really compelling reason not to do it.
But yes, Baku decks have 30 cards just like any other deck.
While the quest reward looks really enticing, it's hard to say how quickly and consistently rogue can complete it in time for the weapon to become more relevant than just two wagglepick swings. Current burgle rogue lists are still essentially tempo rogue decks that splash in 4 burgle minions to activate Vendetta, but you'd probably have to double that number to reliably complete the quest. What do you cut? Leeroy, eviscerate, Cleef? Spirit of the Shark and Shadowstep? Early tempo tools like SI and Backstab?
What interest me about this quest is the potential for a real late-game rogue deck that tries to control the board with Ancient Blades while working toward some crazy Togwaggle or Pogohopper finish, but I suspect that's too greedy to be viable.
Big Priest has its own hate subreddit. Everything that is either high tier or annoying to play against receives hate, including Odd Paladin, but it doesn't come close to how much Big Priest is despised. I suppose the large amount of tech cards and other attempted solutions against it have at least partly been fueled by the players' reactions towards the deck, but it's impossible to know the motivations of Blizzard. Tech cards would be preferable with both odd/even decks and Big Priest, tbh as much as I hate Big Priest I wouldn't want anything in it to actually be nerfed. For Genn and Baku, some kind of reverse Inspire (triggers from opponent's hero power), temporary cost increase, temporary disable, and temporary replacement I could see working.
Don't forget that Mindbreaker was around when the DKs as well as Genn and Baku were in the meta and never saw play. Shutting off the HP for one turn or so has proven to be a poor answer to permanent upgraded hero powers, because their real strength lies in incremental value (well except for DK paladin I suppose).
Is the discussion about whether or not the cards should be nerfed or will be nerfed? You've conflated the two a couple of times, committing an appeal to authority.
I would prefer it if the topic remained whether they should be nerfed, but when the counterargument being presented is "Wild/HS ought to be X way, so you're wrong", it's very unfair of you to call me out for citing the game designers' views on what Wild/HS ought to be. An appeal to authority isn't always a fallacy, especially with something as subjective as "what is this game about?"
It is especially in subjective topics a fallacy. At least in objective questions it can be argued that the authority itself is making an argument, and therefor to appeal to it is to say that since the authority makes the argument, the argument can be made and is a part of the argument in which appeal to authority is used.
Maybe I'm indeed a bit unfair in only targeting the fallacy of your side, but the reason I got involved here in the first place is that your argumentation was so much better than the other side's that I felt it was warping the direction of the debate - you were doing adequate job of disproving their arguments so I saw no need to do it. I don't feel strongly enough about not nerfing Baku or Genn to partake in this discussion just because I disagreed. Some people throw slurs like "dishonest argumentation" at me but I'm just saying, just because I argue for a side, don't assume that's my opinion - thus why I rebutted RavenSunHS' comment.
That's a very long way to say, it's not unfair, you're committing an appeal to authority and it totally is a fallacy.
So to actually try to reach a conclusion here, it's a fallacious argument indeed that HS should be any way, but even more so is to try and justify it, as if claiming it is an objective fact in the first place. In the end it's just a subjective opinion whether playing against odd/even decks is enjoyable and whether they should be nerfed or changed or not.
I appreciate you playing the devil's advocate but I think you're wrong WRT this appeal to authority being fallacious. "Fun" is subjective, but if the topic is a specific game, and you can cite the game's author saying "I'm doing X Y and Z to make the game more fun" then whether or not you agree with their definition of fun, the statement still stands as an authoritative claim about the direction of the game's development. It doesn't mean an endorsement of those design choices as the objective truth.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that HS objectively has to be a certain way, I'm claiming that, objectively, the devs have claimed their intent to make it a certain way.
You not agreeing with the argument doesn't make it not an argument. If you want to make *that* case you have to actually substantively address the argument and point out where it's fallacious. The devs have stated ad nauseam that their goal isn't just to keep the game balanced, but also "fresh" "fun" "not stale", etc. By most people's standards that excludes high levels of repetitiveness.
The degree to which T5 feels that the game needs to be fresh vs stale is not something we have inside knowledge of. If the goal was to make it so that wild never has major predictable or stale cards/plays you'd have to either be constantly nerfing past expansion class staples or introducing major power creep that makes the old powerful staples way less desirable compared to new cards. That is not realistic in the slightest.
Again I go back to my Bloodreaver Gul'Dan argument. Unless you're playing an extremely low curve zoolock build, heavily emphasizing low to midrange curved plays and not building for a late game back up plan then there is not a single warlock deck worth its weight that would ever not include the DK. Be it midrange, control, combo, or straight up OTK the DK will always be extremely good as it creates a pseudo-infinite removal system via the hero power, creates value out of thin air and empty boards, and completely strips the drawback of the warlock hero power/self-damaging theme away due to guaranteed healing each turn. And there are plenty more examples, although much less overblown than DKs, that emphasize that removing Genn/Baku for the sake of making the game fresh is laughable because there are already dozens of cards that are so good that they are not going away without being nerfed or deleted.
I agree, we don't have inside knowledge of T5 decision making process. I'm not the one making the argument that wild is meant to be static or w/e, but when presented with such arguments, what little we can glean from dev interviews still counts for more than people presenting their own personal feefees as some immutable fact or rule.
I don't know why people keep going back to some generic concept of "stale" or "repetitive" when I've made it abundantly clear what my specific problems are with Genn and Baku's design and how they impact gameplay and decision-making. Gul'dan has to be drawn, has to be set up and has to be played for a whopping ten mana. If you want to argue that it leads to linear gameplay when you have single cards that win you the game, or that the card is OP, that's a fine argument to make but I don't see how it has any bearing here, it's just whataboutism. You can't compare a card that costs ten mana to play to do anything to a card that starts out activated without even being drawn, let alone played.
To your question: no, it's actually the other way around. As you can see, we're just arguing from a different perspective.
You say that as long as perk exists, deck is repetitive.
I say say as long as cards exist, deck is not repetitive.
As I mentioned, you keep reducing this down to a binary. Why? You've already conceded that pressing the button turn after turn is repetitive, so if that is the key distinction between these decks and others, how does it not follow that they're more repetitive than decks that don't?
If I take a glass of water and add a spoonful of salt, then whether or not you consider the water salty is subjective, but surely it is objectively more salty than the glass of clear water?
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As for the nerf, they already performed killer nerfs in the past where necessary. Since they didn't, i doubt necessity is there.
Again, do you have any specific ideas on how these cards could be "killer nerfed" while maintaining their overall functionality? I don't. I suppose they could have given them an entirely new ability or condition a la Warsong Commander, but as far as i'm concerned an early rotation is tantamount to a killer nerf.
While there are a lot of things you can do as a user to promote your decks, this is one area where I feel the site itself could be improved a great deal: at the moment the forums feel a bit isolated from other sections of the site like news and decks/guides, where discussion might occur as well. It seems to me that having a new deck or news item post as a forum thread would direct more traffic towards them and encourage more discussion/interaction from people who might not otherwise see that content.
A handy rule for triggered effects is to always check whether they occur "when(ever)" or "after" they occur. A "when(ever)"-trigger occurs immediately, prior to the thing that triggers it (Explosive Trap, Vaporize), an "after"-trigger occurs after the event that triggered it(Rat Trap, Flame Ward).
That said, when in doubt it's always worth testing weird interactions, especially with cards that are worded in an unusual way, because Hearthstone isn't the most consistent of games and brevity is often chosen over specificity.
I was wondering if you guys could add "Quest" and "Secret" to the list of card types in the search engine. They're sufficiently different from other spells to warrant a separate filter and especially the latter would be pretty useful considering the number of secrets in existence as well as the fact that dedicated secret decks are a regular occurrence in wild and standard alike.
It matters a great deal if that's the reason you presented for Blizzard not moving Whizzbang. If you want to change your argument now that it's been refuted, that's fine, but at least have the decency to acknowledge you were wrong before shifting those goalposts.
"Sometimes personal anecdote counts for more than statistics and a giant sample size"
Errr....... right.
I don't think you can reasonably distinguish "rarity creep" from power creep, it's part of the same process. Obviously if the average power level goes up over time, the amount of power you can expect from any given rarity will go up as well, to the point where today's commons might look like yesteryear's legendaries. That said, Maexxna was never a particularly powerful or exciting card, even when she was first introduced, so I have no problem whatsoever with a common card stealing her very very bland, vanilla thunder. If anything, Maexxna was a bad legendary, even back in the day: Sure, poisonous wasn't a keyword yet, but she was still effectively a fatter, more expensive Emperor Cobra.
As fr the issue of neutral legendaries, I for one am glad that they're no longer the most dominant force in HS as it would make deckbuilding incredibly stale and repetitive. It's bad enough that Zilliax goes into virtually every deck, the last thing I'd want is more auto-include neutral legendaries. I wouldn't mind seeing more decks that don't explicitly require a class legendary though.
I disagree. For one, it seems to me one of the main benefits of having evergreen and rotating sets is that you can have deviant cards in the latter because they rotate out anyway, EG Conjurer's Calling for mage or Hagatha the Witch for shaman. What's more, it's not as if all of the remaining plagues are equally powerful, for example the warlock plague is pretty weak and situational. They could have made a similar card for rogue that returns all friendly minions to hand and bounces a random enemy minion for each friendly returned in this way; I doubt that would have been much of a balance concern and it would have at least lived up to the idea of a board clear cycle for all of the villain classes.
I understand team 5 wanting to be more responsive and open, and I think that's a good idea in general, but to me the class identity document seemed more like an ass-pull to explain away the rather abrupt and arbitrary HoF-ing of Vanish and Mind Blast. If you just take it as a loose guideline then it doesn't explain the urgency in removing those cards, whereas if you take it as a hard set of rules then they've already broken their promise in the very next set they released after explaining their policy. I think they were open, but less than honest with the memo, and now they're stuck in their contradictions and frantically altering design decisions after-the-fact rather than just admitting that maybe the class identity thing was a poor choice, or at least poorly communicated.
It's a bad card. If you're going to include an understatted silence guy gal to answer key enemy minions you might as well have that be a minion that can silence anything, not just taunts.
Even if shieldbreaker had a fair statline, that is to say, 2/3 or 3/2, the fact that it can only silence enemy taunts is a huge detriment to the card as a tech inclusion. You might run it as a "real" card in aggro lists though if it were a river croc with potential upside, but it isn't.
I don't know if most players were hyped about this back when RR came out, but if they were, they were wrong. Shieldbreaker is no prenerf Ironbeak Owl, not even close.
IMO Uldum was just the first example of the class identity memo negatively impacting HS card design, with more to follow. I've heard that Plague of Madness was a last-minute change from an actual board clear because the devs belatedly realised that rogue's not allowed to have mass removal.
Publishing the class identity document was a totally unforced error on Blizzard's part: they could have just not posted the damn thing in a transparent attempt to rationalise their hall of fame decisions, but instead they gave everyone unlimited ammo to criticise any and all future choices by the developers, either for following the memo too strictly or for straying from it.
I'd wager it's due to the sleep mechanic being based on summoning sickness. Otherwise you'd be able to give any minion charge by silencing them the turn they're played.
Mage's removal spells are almost without exception damage (and/or freeze) based, that's the class's flavour. What little single target hard removal exists in the class typically requires the target to be frozen already.
As for why other classes regularly get good AoE clears and mage doesn't, it's because of mage's evergreen card pool, which contains flamestrike, blizzard, frost nova and cone of cold. If you want to see better mage AoE, petition blizzard to HoF some more mage spells or better yet, change the rotation system to somehow include evergreen sets. Considering how strong the basic mage cards are I'm genuinely surprised mage even got the AoE it did this set, especially since it shores up the major weakness of secret mage which is already a viable (and incredibly irritating) wild deck.
Because mage got a 3 damage explosive trap & Arcane Flakmage, and because that class identity memo is an unworkable mess.
If there is a "downvote effect" it's people's tendency to express themselves once they've seen a sufficient number of others do the same. If a post gets more than say 3 up/downvotes it will tend to accumulate these even if it's not a spectacularly good or bad post.
That said I don't think you can really draw any inferences from people's voting habits to if/how they otherwise express themselves. For all you know some people are more inclined to post a critical reply once they see it's "safe" by the fact that the rest of the forum has already nuked the OP with downvotes.
It's bizarre and completely counter-intuitive for those 1/1 tokens not to become 4/4 the minute they hit the board. I'm pretty sure they're not doing this for balance purposes, so who in their right mind thinks this is more intuitive or easy to understand?
Terrible change.
Terrific card for the new big spell/choose one druid archetype. Who cares about floating mana when you get 6/7 stats for four mana?
Amazing card, also a neat little bonus to the quest.
No I'm not. I'm really really not. I'm explicitly making a relative argument. The amount of reaching and adding on assumptions you had to do to turn a straightforward example of something being relative (less or more salty) into a binary (somehow?) is astonishing. Why do you persist with this? Do you genuinely not understand what I'm saying? Just answer the question: Which is MORE salty, a glass of clean water or a glass of water with 1 spoon of salt? This isn't a trick question.
Having an improved HP essentially means that the starting question for your turn ought to be "Do I want to press the button?", and you need a really compelling reason not to do it.
But yes, Baku decks have 30 cards just like any other deck.
While the quest reward looks really enticing, it's hard to say how quickly and consistently rogue can complete it in time for the weapon to become more relevant than just two wagglepick swings. Current burgle rogue lists are still essentially tempo rogue decks that splash in 4 burgle minions to activate Vendetta, but you'd probably have to double that number to reliably complete the quest. What do you cut? Leeroy, eviscerate, Cleef? Spirit of the Shark and Shadowstep? Early tempo tools like SI and Backstab?
What interest me about this quest is the potential for a real late-game rogue deck that tries to control the board with Ancient Blades while working toward some crazy Togwaggle or Pogohopper finish, but I suspect that's too greedy to be viable.
Don't forget that Mindbreaker was around when the DKs as well as Genn and Baku were in the meta and never saw play. Shutting off the HP for one turn or so has proven to be a poor answer to permanent upgraded hero powers, because their real strength lies in incremental value (well except for DK paladin I suppose).
I appreciate you playing the devil's advocate but I think you're wrong WRT this appeal to authority being fallacious. "Fun" is subjective, but if the topic is a specific game, and you can cite the game's author saying "I'm doing X Y and Z to make the game more fun" then whether or not you agree with their definition of fun, the statement still stands as an authoritative claim about the direction of the game's development. It doesn't mean an endorsement of those design choices as the objective truth.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that HS objectively has to be a certain way, I'm claiming that, objectively, the devs have claimed their intent to make it a certain way.
I agree, we don't have inside knowledge of T5 decision making process. I'm not the one making the argument that wild is meant to be static or w/e, but when presented with such arguments, what little we can glean from dev interviews still counts for more than people presenting their own personal feefees as some immutable fact or rule.
I don't know why people keep going back to some generic concept of "stale" or "repetitive" when I've made it abundantly clear what my specific problems are with Genn and Baku's design and how they impact gameplay and decision-making. Gul'dan has to be drawn, has to be set up and has to be played for a whopping ten mana. If you want to argue that it leads to linear gameplay when you have single cards that win you the game, or that the card is OP, that's a fine argument to make but I don't see how it has any bearing here, it's just whataboutism. You can't compare a card that costs ten mana to play to do anything to a card that starts out activated without even being drawn, let alone played.
As I mentioned, you keep reducing this down to a binary. Why? You've already conceded that pressing the button turn after turn is repetitive, so if that is the key distinction between these decks and others, how does it not follow that they're more repetitive than decks that don't?
If I take a glass of water and add a spoonful of salt, then whether or not you consider the water salty is subjective, but surely it is objectively more salty than the glass of clear water?
Again, do you have any specific ideas on how these cards could be "killer nerfed" while maintaining their overall functionality? I don't. I suppose they could have given them an entirely new ability or condition a la Warsong Commander, but as far as i'm concerned an early rotation is tantamount to a killer nerf.