Although it would be an 11 mana combo, Brann Bronzebeard will double the Put the Money in the Bag! progression.
Worth noting Shadowcrafter Scabbs' hero power reduces this to 9 mana. It's well worth waiting to get that set up to expedite completing the achievement and to feel twice as villainous!
It's a bit more complicated, but you can do it with the help of Scabbs Cutterbutter too (our SI:7 gnome friend really wants to help on this one). I've not tried him in pirate rogue yet, but the mana curve means he should be a solid inclusion.
The Switcheroo nerf is funny, because it essentially only means priest needs only one additional card to do whats its been doing, which will explain why it got banned from wild despite a nerf. So...what are you going to be doing in two years time when it moves to wild proper, team5? Or are we going where a turn 4 lethal is essentially too slow then?
Isn't the plan for all banned cards to change them drastically when they rotate out of Standard? So at that point they can give it the Warsong Commander treatment. "Draw 2 minions. Give them +1 attack if they have Charge" sounds like a pretty good fix to me, especially as homage to the fact it is currently being abused by a charge minion :P
Some of your revisions get there, but I do think you are underestimating some of your cards. Odin's AoE is 1-sided and does so much damage that it practically says 'destroy all enemy minions'. Add in the +10 armour, which will keep you alive for quite a while, and significant board presence, and he's a lot more powerful than a "sometimes better Twisting Nether".
For Freyja, there are lots of cards you can use as reference points. Most of them are in rogue, e.g. Vilespine Slayer, Flik Skyshiv, Bootstrap Sunkeneer, but warlock also has Keli'dan the Breaker. Other than some situational cases with Flik, all of these are significantly weaker than your Freyja, even before the discover effect is included. Furthermore, this is an effect that rogue is designed to be the best class at, so a warlock card really shouldn't be pushing the power level that far.
On the class design side, DH is meant to be pretty bad at dealing with big minions too. Jormungand being 10 mana might stop it seeing play in practice so it becomes a non-issue, but I'd still be hesitant to put destroy effects in that class if it wants to feel like a DH card. This is something tricky for card design: you simultaneously want cards to do something new, while feeling consistent with the old cards in that class.
Ratatoskr is pretty cool, but yes, it would need a mana increase. I'd guess to 3-5 if we want to avoid him being too much of a high-roll. Design-wise its biggest problem is that he's a bit too complicated. If it only had one of the 3 effects (whichever one best fits the messenger flavour) then I could absolutely believe its a real HS card.
I'm not sure where I stand on Thor, though certainly I don't think a Consecration + bigger Cariel Roame is too weak at 6 mana. If he feels too basic, you might consider switching out the AoE for an effect giving you Mjolnir? That could mean something simple like how Tirion Fordring works, but with Mjolnir itself having some fancy lightning-based effect? That could just add extra steps to what already exists, but at least it would feel more interesting.
Finally, as a slow rogue player, I approve wholeheartedly of your Loki design! The flavour, stats and mechanics fit rogue design perfectly. That said, it might suffer from being too slow to be worth much against aggro, and has too little health to survive any AoE against control. If so, it's in an awkward spot where it's basically never as useful as it looks. Given it's really slow in a class that is anything but slow, I wonder if you could get away with buffing his return to hand effect to a deathrattle? I.e. card text: "Stealth. After this attacks a minion it vanishes. Deathrattle: return this to your hand." Control would hate it, of course, but rogue has a long history of ruining control's day so that might be fine.
Anyway, I've been nitpicking balance but I want to reiterate the designs are cool!
The flavour is pretty good all-round, which is impressive given it stays within normal HS mechanics. Loki is a bit weird mechanically, but that makes perfect sense for the character.
You might consider nerfing many of them into a state that would be plausible for current HS designs. Fenrir, for example, is way stronger than the (recently buffed) Darius Crowley and Odin... well he's got 2x Flamestrike, +10 armour, plus a 7/7 body with 2x 2/1 rushers, all for the same cost as a single Flamestrike. Those are certainly not the only ones that would raise concerns about balance, though some of them may be OK (e.g. Loki and Skadi).
I appreciate people often design cards purely for flavour and assume balance would be sorted if they were ever actually printed - I'm sure the initial design team does that a lot too - but you should attempt to make the cards look half-balanced. I'd be interested to hear how you chose the numbers on some of them, when to me they are so clearly overtuned I'd never even consider them when designing a card.
With the Hydralodon one, you can just discover a second copy with Selective Breeder. It doesn't require all the heads to be from the same base minion, and each one summons 6 heads without putting in any effort, so it basically only requires you to have 2 Hydralodons and you're done.
The issue with this in mech decks is partly due to a small pool of mechs - as @dapperdog pointed out - but also a high number of cards that discover more mechs. All tribes get Amalgam of the Deep, but mechs have Gorillabot A-3 and Deeprun Engineer too.
Given my biggest gripe with both mech decks is their ability to discover more copies of things than you can hope to play around, I feel like adding the Gorillabot to the Core set was the real mistake. They knew mechs would have 4 discovers already, so why give them 2 more? They could easily have replaced Spider Tank with Harvest Golem, perhaps with a slight buff, and they would have given mechs the slight buff they were after without putting us so deep into this situation.
I don't think the rules of discover need to change though. The rarity aspect has been accepted with basically zero concern since LoE, making this a quantity over quality matter right now. Besides, tying discover rarities to the rarity of the card doing the discovering has 3 problems:
It reduces card pools further. Sure that probably makes it harder to find legendaries, but good luck with them finding even more Mecha-Sharks.
Discover has always been a mechanism for players with limited collections to experience using cards they don't own, especially epics and legendaries. Taking that away is actively hurting new and F2P players.
How would it handle instances where token cards do the discovering/generating? They have no rarity, and you cannot discover non-collectible cards.
Hi AngryShuckie, I wondered the same thing and asked a similar question a few months ago in the Rewards Track 4.0 thread. A helpful community member DragonDraena responded with the information that the addition to the electricity bill should be about $2 per year. Since I mostly play HS on my mobile device anyways, chasing XP this way I consider to be okay. From a more philosophical or puristic view, I can imagine that this way of XP farming can be considered the contrary though.
As for the XP calculation, I too consider (in my case) 144 XP to be not a lot. However, performing this about eleven times a day would result in a level increase (or 50 gold) by doing almost nothing. Since they removed this strategy, it is no longer possible and I can only fallback on active XP farming which would net me a maximum of 202 XP each game (or 30 minutes).
Honestly, it feels kind of weird that XP is tied to time spent in any mode in HS (especially time spent in PvE modes), but since this is what Team 5 implemented, I just use it to my advantage as efficient as I see possibly fit to my needs.
Fair enough, it sounds a sensible approach monetarily. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you have a massive surplus of gold and/or dust that you don't know what to do with? If so, I wonder whether the extra gold it gets you is actually worth anything, and that it might be beneficial all around to cut out that grind? (If not, then obviously ignore me.)
I remember Iksar said he wondered if it was a mistake tying XP to time, but it makes great sense in PvP: it feels much nicer knowing you've at least gained something from a loss than the old system. When only the winner gained gold, it disincentivised trying janky things just for fun. In PvE, win rates must be much higher, so I guess you could attach it to wins directly without drastic changes, but it is simplest to be consistent across game modes.
You can more easily finish piranha's by playing pally in wild. Just buff it and then double its attack with Blessed Champion. Just run a few minions that gives stuff to your opponent and rush it in. Might take a few tries, but its better than doing it one at a time. Paladin can even easily tutor those fishes.
I have to agree with the rogue and warrior 500xp achievement. Seems more like a joke. The best I can think of for rogue is to get the two cards out, play it after something like faelin or Academic Espionage and just concede for another game. Probably skip this myself, because xp or no, Im not bshitting myself for team5's amusement. Because unless you're literally running 50 games per day in standard there's no chance this can ever be done naturally in 4 months.
As for warrior's, it can go fuck itself. The Fires of Zin-Azshari being an epic card is bad enough. First drawing it, then playing one card per turn with an unhelpful opponent, and wild being the cesspool as it is? yeah, just not happening.
I don't know why people are against doing the Feeding Frenzy achievement in shaman. I did it pretty quickly there, helped by having by far the most generators (which scales the damage quickly) and having Flametongue Totem and Anchored Totem to scale them further, and Bloodlust too. Heck, there's only 3 collectible totems in Standard, so Amalgam of the Deep can guarantee you whichever extra copies you want.
For the warrior one, it coincided with me needing 30 wins to get the class to 500 wins (and a refusal to play pirate warrior), so I was at least killing 2 birds with 1 stone. Honestly, the card isn't even that bad, and there were lots of games I won because of it. It's easily one of the better designed versions of that type of card, because at least you know you're drawing something significant each turn, so any meme-players who liked those cards before should be happy enough to let the achievement complete itself. Try-hards might want to leave it alone though.
Finally for rogue's Gone Fishin' one... thankfully I play a LOT of rogue, and always love shuffle mechanics, so I'm sure I'll get this one done eventually without trying. For non-rogue mains though, I agree it's an excessive chore compared to many of the other grindy achievements that can be done much more quickly. It makes you wonder how they determine what thresholds to set; it's clearly not to be comparably quick.
Sure Riffraff, the biggest change they made is quite impactful and affects the passive XP farmer in Mercenaries. Nowadays, leaving a game unfinished will no longer result in an autoloss after 30 minutes and award 120 XP + the paid rewards track % bonus. Instead, the game will be resumed and completing it afterwards does not award any XP whatsoever.
This behavior was obviously changed to counteract passive XP farming in Mercenaries. I just hope they will not implement even more countermeasures.
I knew this was a thing but never engaged with it or knew the numbers. Tbh, 120 XP is pretty poor for 30 mins and I wonder if it even compares well with the cost of electricity to have it running for that time. I.e., are you actually better off just spending money on the game directly rather than handing more money to electricity companies?
Assuming we're working with late levels where 1500 XP = 50g, we could do the calculation based on our electricity rates. The hardest part is estimating the power consumption of passive Mercs, which might be possible with the help of a Smart Meter (for people who have one). It's still tricky though, and won't tell you the electricity cost at the server's end. In any case, with the world needing to go more green and use less power, I'd have to make the claim that the moral choice is always going to be to give the money to Blizzard (I know... it feels weird to say), or just live without the XP farmed this way.
They scrap a lot of design ideas each expansion, so maybe. Of course it could just be a necessary feature if they want air-breathing characters to interact with naga and other creatures underwater. Plus it just makes perfect sense in Hooktusk's case if Gral's blessing is already a thing in WoW.
It fixes the issue with the Twin-fin variant, but it nowhere does the same justice to Boar variant. Divine Spirit and Inner Fire still exist, and 20HP x 2 = 40, so no.
The Boar version can already do that if it wants. At least that would require more combo pieces and mana, which will either drag down win rates by itself or allow a bit more time for some tech cards to be played.
That doesn't mean their stated odds are wrong, and I really wouldn't trust the average person to correctly calculate the statistics from anecdotal evidence, especially when human psychology is determined to remember the bad times over the good.
I doubt they'd ever change their averages, but they could modify the distribution to reduce the variance to cut out the 'feels bad' gaps of 30-40 packs between legendaries. It would come alongside a reduction in the number of highroll pack openings, but I expect it would be a net improvement to how people feel on average without them losing any profit.
I'd be amazed if they ever let us buy entire expansions straight up, especially with gold. How would that even work for them? If we get enough gold from the rewards track frequent players wouldn't ever have to spend money, and if we don't get enough gold then it doesn't really help anyway. You could say profit comes primarily from cosmetics in this case, but they've told us cosmetics are a small fraction of their profits, so that's not a realistic option.
It's a nice idea, and makes me wonder why Classic decks are blocked from Naxx (and other Adventures). Presumably when the Standard-Wild split occurred they coded it to search for Wild decks and never changed it. Maybe the HS code doesn't actually have the means to simultaneously allow both Wild and Classic and it isn't as easy as it sounds to change it? It sounds silly, but I know from experience that you often code something that makes good sense at the time, then regret needing to change an awful lot just to generalise it a bit.
I know Classic saw a lot of nerfs over the years, but I wonder how much that really limits you in Heroic Naxx if you want to make a pseudo-Classic deck out of Legacy cards. From what I recall, the most useful cards were often janky things that weren't ever nerf targets. So you can still give it a go forcing that constraint on yourself, perhaps allowing Naxx cards too.
As I said to Zyella below, I wonder if the fact quests and hero cards are normal now will diminish people's enjoyment if we actually went back there. After all, people loved the DKs intially, but really loathed them by the end and I'd be surprised if people really returned to their original mindset on that. (Rexxar might get away with it without Vicious Scalehide in the pool though.) Replace the feeling of trying new stuff with just trying to get an old favourite to work, and suddenly the meta becomes a bigger impediment to enjoyment. That's been my personal experience with Classic, and why I never touch it despite loving it back in 2014.
I'm not sure going back to any era would circumvent that of course. Perhaps the best approach would actually be to pick any era but add nerfs like they would these days (rather than the old attitude of very rarely changing things), or even outright ban un-fixable cards. So we could experience Naxx without Undertaker being rampant, or MSoG without Patches, for example. It would be the 99% the same from a deck-building standpoint, but a completely different meta that allows for experimentation.
There was definitely a time when Kingsbane rogue was very popular, but it wasn't right at K&C launch due to druid bs. I remember facing lots of rogues and just praying they didn't draw Leeching Poison because it was pretty much game over as soon as they did. For the record, I loved playing that Kingsbane rogue too, but stopped playing it quickly because I felt so dirty with it.
Anyway, I do agree it was notably better than the Year of the Phoenix, since the Barrens was kinda uninteresting and UiS questlines have messed things up since. But if I had to order my favourite HS years Mammoth would only end up somewhere in the middle. It was perhaps the most flashy - adding several new card types - and that probably contributes a lot to people's fond memories. But I wonder how well that would hold up today when quests and hero cards are commonplace? It might be like Classic, which I know I loved in 2014 but I can't muster any interest in it now it's all so well established. If that attitude is common, then people might see Mammoth for its metas rather than the newness of it all.
Your opinions are your own, but this is mostly how I recall that year: Quest rogue, pirate warrior, jade druid, druid-being-so-far-into-S-tier-it-can-win-with-anything-it-likes-Stone, cube-lock with way too much healing, Kingsbane with permanent lifesteal... I swear people view the Year of the Mammoth with rose-tinted lenses that might as well be made out of actual rose petals. The year had plenty of cool stuff, but its metas generated just as many complaints as any other, so I've never really understood all the love it gets.
Depending on how many spells rogue gets in the Sunken City mini-set and the next expansion, I could see them returning it to its original stats then. It's an unfortunate fix, but one that can at least be very temporary.
It doesn't, because the achievement XP you are using to race to the XP bonus would just pick up that 'lost' bonus instead. That includes claiming them as part of the AV rewards track.
I'm a doctor of (theoretical) physics, and I know what I'm doing with the maths here. The ONLY loss of XP comes from overshooting the level boundaries where you increase the XP bonus, since the quest you complete only sees the lower bonus. So if you really want to min-max it, make sure you get XP in the smallest possible increments at those levels. But even then a 5% difference on a single quest is pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things.
Worth noting Shadowcrafter Scabbs' hero power reduces this to 9 mana. It's well worth waiting to get that set up to expedite completing the achievement and to feel twice as villainous!
It's a bit more complicated, but you can do it with the help of Scabbs Cutterbutter too (our SI:7 gnome friend really wants to help on this one). I've not tried him in pirate rogue yet, but the mana curve means he should be a solid inclusion.
Not that it changes the timeline at all, but the Demon Seed wasn't the first card banned. Stealer of Souls will need a major rework too. Anyway, there might be no precedent, but there are comments made by the devs when Stealer of Souls was banned (see https://outof.cards/hearthstone/3251-hearthstone-bans-its-first-card-in-wild-next-week-stealer-of-souls).
Isn't the plan for all banned cards to change them drastically when they rotate out of Standard? So at that point they can give it the Warsong Commander treatment. "Draw 2 minions. Give them +1 attack if they have Charge" sounds like a pretty good fix to me, especially as homage to the fact it is currently being abused by a charge minion :P
Some of your revisions get there, but I do think you are underestimating some of your cards. Odin's AoE is 1-sided and does so much damage that it practically says 'destroy all enemy minions'. Add in the +10 armour, which will keep you alive for quite a while, and significant board presence, and he's a lot more powerful than a "sometimes better Twisting Nether".
For Freyja, there are lots of cards you can use as reference points. Most of them are in rogue, e.g. Vilespine Slayer, Flik Skyshiv, Bootstrap Sunkeneer, but warlock also has Keli'dan the Breaker. Other than some situational cases with Flik, all of these are significantly weaker than your Freyja, even before the discover effect is included. Furthermore, this is an effect that rogue is designed to be the best class at, so a warlock card really shouldn't be pushing the power level that far.
On the class design side, DH is meant to be pretty bad at dealing with big minions too. Jormungand being 10 mana might stop it seeing play in practice so it becomes a non-issue, but I'd still be hesitant to put destroy effects in that class if it wants to feel like a DH card. This is something tricky for card design: you simultaneously want cards to do something new, while feeling consistent with the old cards in that class.
Ratatoskr is pretty cool, but yes, it would need a mana increase. I'd guess to 3-5 if we want to avoid him being too much of a high-roll. Design-wise its biggest problem is that he's a bit too complicated. If it only had one of the 3 effects (whichever one best fits the messenger flavour) then I could absolutely believe its a real HS card.
I'm not sure where I stand on Thor, though certainly I don't think a Consecration + bigger Cariel Roame is too weak at 6 mana. If he feels too basic, you might consider switching out the AoE for an effect giving you Mjolnir? That could mean something simple like how Tirion Fordring works, but with Mjolnir itself having some fancy lightning-based effect? That could just add extra steps to what already exists, but at least it would feel more interesting.
Finally, as a slow rogue player, I approve wholeheartedly of your Loki design! The flavour, stats and mechanics fit rogue design perfectly. That said, it might suffer from being too slow to be worth much against aggro, and has too little health to survive any AoE against control. If so, it's in an awkward spot where it's basically never as useful as it looks. Given it's really slow in a class that is anything but slow, I wonder if you could get away with buffing his return to hand effect to a deathrattle? I.e. card text: "Stealth. After this attacks a minion it vanishes. Deathrattle: return this to your hand." Control would hate it, of course, but rogue has a long history of ruining control's day so that might be fine.
Anyway, I've been nitpicking balance but I want to reiterate the designs are cool!
The flavour is pretty good all-round, which is impressive given it stays within normal HS mechanics. Loki is a bit weird mechanically, but that makes perfect sense for the character.
You might consider nerfing many of them into a state that would be plausible for current HS designs. Fenrir, for example, is way stronger than the (recently buffed) Darius Crowley and Odin... well he's got 2x Flamestrike, +10 armour, plus a 7/7 body with 2x 2/1 rushers, all for the same cost as a single Flamestrike. Those are certainly not the only ones that would raise concerns about balance, though some of them may be OK (e.g. Loki and Skadi).
I appreciate people often design cards purely for flavour and assume balance would be sorted if they were ever actually printed - I'm sure the initial design team does that a lot too - but you should attempt to make the cards look half-balanced. I'd be interested to hear how you chose the numbers on some of them, when to me they are so clearly overtuned I'd never even consider them when designing a card.
With the Hydralodon one, you can just discover a second copy with Selective Breeder. It doesn't require all the heads to be from the same base minion, and each one summons 6 heads without putting in any effort, so it basically only requires you to have 2 Hydralodons and you're done.
The issue with this in mech decks is partly due to a small pool of mechs - as @dapperdog pointed out - but also a high number of cards that discover more mechs. All tribes get Amalgam of the Deep, but mechs have Gorillabot A-3 and Deeprun Engineer too.
Given my biggest gripe with both mech decks is their ability to discover more copies of things than you can hope to play around, I feel like adding the Gorillabot to the Core set was the real mistake. They knew mechs would have 4 discovers already, so why give them 2 more? They could easily have replaced Spider Tank with Harvest Golem, perhaps with a slight buff, and they would have given mechs the slight buff they were after without putting us so deep into this situation.
I don't think the rules of discover need to change though. The rarity aspect has been accepted with basically zero concern since LoE, making this a quantity over quality matter right now. Besides, tying discover rarities to the rarity of the card doing the discovering has 3 problems:
Fair enough, it sounds a sensible approach monetarily. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you have a massive surplus of gold and/or dust that you don't know what to do with? If so, I wonder whether the extra gold it gets you is actually worth anything, and that it might be beneficial all around to cut out that grind? (If not, then obviously ignore me.)
I remember Iksar said he wondered if it was a mistake tying XP to time, but it makes great sense in PvP: it feels much nicer knowing you've at least gained something from a loss than the old system. When only the winner gained gold, it disincentivised trying janky things just for fun. In PvE, win rates must be much higher, so I guess you could attach it to wins directly without drastic changes, but it is simplest to be consistent across game modes.
I don't know why people are against doing the Feeding Frenzy achievement in shaman. I did it pretty quickly there, helped by having by far the most generators (which scales the damage quickly) and having Flametongue Totem and Anchored Totem to scale them further, and Bloodlust too. Heck, there's only 3 collectible totems in Standard, so Amalgam of the Deep can guarantee you whichever extra copies you want.
For the warrior one, it coincided with me needing 30 wins to get the class to 500 wins (and a refusal to play pirate warrior), so I was at least killing 2 birds with 1 stone. Honestly, the card isn't even that bad, and there were lots of games I won because of it. It's easily one of the better designed versions of that type of card, because at least you know you're drawing something significant each turn, so any meme-players who liked those cards before should be happy enough to let the achievement complete itself. Try-hards might want to leave it alone though.
Finally for rogue's Gone Fishin' one... thankfully I play a LOT of rogue, and always love shuffle mechanics, so I'm sure I'll get this one done eventually without trying. For non-rogue mains though, I agree it's an excessive chore compared to many of the other grindy achievements that can be done much more quickly. It makes you wonder how they determine what thresholds to set; it's clearly not to be comparably quick.
I knew this was a thing but never engaged with it or knew the numbers. Tbh, 120 XP is pretty poor for 30 mins and I wonder if it even compares well with the cost of electricity to have it running for that time. I.e., are you actually better off just spending money on the game directly rather than handing more money to electricity companies?
Assuming we're working with late levels where 1500 XP = 50g, we could do the calculation based on our electricity rates. The hardest part is estimating the power consumption of passive Mercs, which might be possible with the help of a Smart Meter (for people who have one). It's still tricky though, and won't tell you the electricity cost at the server's end. In any case, with the world needing to go more green and use less power, I'd have to make the claim that the moral choice is always going to be to give the money to Blizzard (I know... it feels weird to say), or just live without the XP farmed this way.
They scrap a lot of design ideas each expansion, so maybe. Of course it could just be a necessary feature if they want air-breathing characters to interact with naga and other creatures underwater. Plus it just makes perfect sense in Hooktusk's case if Gral's blessing is already a thing in WoW.
The Boar version can already do that if it wants. At least that would require more combo pieces and mana, which will either drag down win rates by itself or allow a bit more time for some tech cards to be played.
That doesn't mean their stated odds are wrong, and I really wouldn't trust the average person to correctly calculate the statistics from anecdotal evidence, especially when human psychology is determined to remember the bad times over the good.
I doubt they'd ever change their averages, but they could modify the distribution to reduce the variance to cut out the 'feels bad' gaps of 30-40 packs between legendaries. It would come alongside a reduction in the number of highroll pack openings, but I expect it would be a net improvement to how people feel on average without them losing any profit.
I'd be amazed if they ever let us buy entire expansions straight up, especially with gold. How would that even work for them? If we get enough gold from the rewards track frequent players wouldn't ever have to spend money, and if we don't get enough gold then it doesn't really help anyway. You could say profit comes primarily from cosmetics in this case, but they've told us cosmetics are a small fraction of their profits, so that's not a realistic option.
It's a nice idea, and makes me wonder why Classic decks are blocked from Naxx (and other Adventures). Presumably when the Standard-Wild split occurred they coded it to search for Wild decks and never changed it. Maybe the HS code doesn't actually have the means to simultaneously allow both Wild and Classic and it isn't as easy as it sounds to change it? It sounds silly, but I know from experience that you often code something that makes good sense at the time, then regret needing to change an awful lot just to generalise it a bit.
I know Classic saw a lot of nerfs over the years, but I wonder how much that really limits you in Heroic Naxx if you want to make a pseudo-Classic deck out of Legacy cards. From what I recall, the most useful cards were often janky things that weren't ever nerf targets. So you can still give it a go forcing that constraint on yourself, perhaps allowing Naxx cards too.
As I said to Zyella below, I wonder if the fact quests and hero cards are normal now will diminish people's enjoyment if we actually went back there. After all, people loved the DKs intially, but really loathed them by the end and I'd be surprised if people really returned to their original mindset on that. (Rexxar might get away with it without Vicious Scalehide in the pool though.) Replace the feeling of trying new stuff with just trying to get an old favourite to work, and suddenly the meta becomes a bigger impediment to enjoyment. That's been my personal experience with Classic, and why I never touch it despite loving it back in 2014.
I'm not sure going back to any era would circumvent that of course. Perhaps the best approach would actually be to pick any era but add nerfs like they would these days (rather than the old attitude of very rarely changing things), or even outright ban un-fixable cards. So we could experience Naxx without Undertaker being rampant, or MSoG without Patches, for example. It would be the 99% the same from a deck-building standpoint, but a completely different meta that allows for experimentation.
There was definitely a time when Kingsbane rogue was very popular, but it wasn't right at K&C launch due to druid bs. I remember facing lots of rogues and just praying they didn't draw Leeching Poison because it was pretty much game over as soon as they did. For the record, I loved playing that Kingsbane rogue too, but stopped playing it quickly because I felt so dirty with it.
Anyway, I do agree it was notably better than the Year of the Phoenix, since the Barrens was kinda uninteresting and UiS questlines have messed things up since. But if I had to order my favourite HS years Mammoth would only end up somewhere in the middle. It was perhaps the most flashy - adding several new card types - and that probably contributes a lot to people's fond memories. But I wonder how well that would hold up today when quests and hero cards are commonplace? It might be like Classic, which I know I loved in 2014 but I can't muster any interest in it now it's all so well established. If that attitude is common, then people might see Mammoth for its metas rather than the newness of it all.
Your opinions are your own, but this is mostly how I recall that year: Quest rogue, pirate warrior, jade druid, druid-being-so-far-into-S-tier-it-can-win-with-anything-it-likes-Stone, cube-lock with way too much healing, Kingsbane with permanent lifesteal... I swear people view the Year of the Mammoth with rose-tinted lenses that might as well be made out of actual rose petals. The year had plenty of cool stuff, but its metas generated just as many complaints as any other, so I've never really understood all the love it gets.
Depending on how many spells rogue gets in the Sunken City mini-set and the next expansion, I could see them returning it to its original stats then. It's an unfortunate fix, but one that can at least be very temporary.
I haven't ever set foot in PvP and still have portraits resetting, so it's not that.
It doesn't, because the achievement XP you are using to race to the XP bonus would just pick up that 'lost' bonus instead. That includes claiming them as part of the AV rewards track.
I'm a doctor of (theoretical) physics, and I know what I'm doing with the maths here. The ONLY loss of XP comes from overshooting the level boundaries where you increase the XP bonus, since the quest you complete only sees the lower bonus. So if you really want to min-max it, make sure you get XP in the smallest possible increments at those levels. But even then a 5% difference on a single quest is pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things.