Do we really want him back when his entire thing, both in game and in meme is charge? We already have Mr Smite bringing the spirit of Leeroy to Standard. By the looks of it we have the 10 (probably 9 non-evil) mercs making up the raiding party, so I assume Leeroy isn't there anyway.
On the one hand I fully understand how we ended up here. On the other hand, Onyxia's lair is a long long way from Alterac Valley and the pedant inside me is pained by these cards officially being part of the AV set. I guess I'll just have to ignore the pedant and be happy to see dragons again; they always push decks in a direction I approve of.
The meme answer is that after all these years people are still discovering the secrets of Pot of Greed and don't fully understand it yet, much less its synergy cards.
For a proper answer I have to disclose my knowledge of YuGiOh is about 15 years out of date, so I really have no idea. But I do recall there were a few cards that were treated as cards of other names, e.g. A Legendary Ocean wasn't Umi, but stated 'This card's name is always treated as "Umi"'. Maybe there is something similar with PoG? I.e. an actually balanced version that is treated as PoG for synergy purposes?
If not, then maybe they just wanted to print cards referencing PoG because of its special place in the history of the game, but only made them for use in casual settings where players can make their own ban lists.
I only have a surface level knowledge of the Three Kingdoms story, but I get the feeling wearing Maiev's helmet might have made things more difficult for Diao Chan :P Besides, Maiev was a (presumably helmet-less) priestess of Elune back in the War of the Ancients, so there's good basis for her look here.
For story I'd also pick Rise of Shadows. The Year of the Dragon was the pinnacle of Hearthstone embracing its own identity, both mechanically and thematically, and RoS was the best of the 3 for me.
It also helps that over the pandemic I have been playing as Togwaggle in a D&D campaign, and we just rounded things off by rescuing - then stealing! - a flying city. We weren't even aiming to mimic the Dalaran Heist, it just ended up that way, and it's beautiful :D
For songs, I'm probably going to lose a few points for this, but I've never liked SoU's song. I appreciate why people would like it, but it's not my kind of thing. I like Witchwood's, though it took a while to grow on me. For my favourite, I'll go for WotOG, with TGT and RR being my honourable mentions. If we expand the search to all trailers, then K&C's "The Light Candle" trailer and the Dalaran Heist trailers need a shout out. (Basically anything with Togwaggle in it is an instant winner :P)
Do we have to include the specific mercenary in the party to beat the heroic boss for unlocking their equipment? I certainly hope not, because this makes it even more difficult.
I beat heroic Ravak and the related equipment did not unlock for my Sinestra, which might be a bug? Can anyone confirm?
EDIT: Hm, I just read that it is part of the requirement to have the specific mercenary included in the party to unlock the related equipment. This sucks!
They did at least make most of them have some form of weakness to the appropriate merc. That's not really the case for Sinestra or Lokholar (heck, I got Lok'holar's elite treasure to freeze all enemies for the first turn, which was great until I realised the final boss can't be frozen...), but Wrathion's final boss has a human weakness, you fight fire with fire (or rather bleed with bleed) with Galvangar, and Drek'thar kindly provides both fire and frost damage buffs for whatever you plan to do with Balinda.
So while it made it more difficult, it wasn't poorly designed.
Odd Hunter: Losing one of its key card was a huge blow; now Tier 3 at best
Quest Pirate: If you look at it in a vaccum the nerf only resulted in a minor decrease in power level; however the deck now gets hard countered in a lot of matchups, especially Freeze Shaman, so the actual power level decreased quite significantly
Well this brings us to the new perpetrator. I only played for like 2 hours post-nerf but in this time around 50% of the matches were against Freeze Shaman, which is clearly the new Tier S deck. I could not win a single game. They can freeze your board for turns and just slam you in the face and if you should survive this well its Shudderwock. Not found a counter yet, I am thinking of some kind of Spell Mage but not sure yet. 100% sure this will get nerfed soon. So my first impression is that one obnoxious deck replaced the other.
Sigh. I had been considering dabbling in Wild again. Pre-Stormwind I played it more than Standard, but barely touched it since.
No matter how you swing it, getting your board permanently frozen is never fun. I'm honestly amazed they gave Shaman the potential for so much AoE freezing after that was the entire cause of frustration against Freeze Mage, and the very thing they told us they wanted to avoid when making Freeze Shaman back in KotFT. It's almost like they knew what they were doing when they made it meme-tier weak...
Keeping hero cards was a definite oversight given the circumstances, though I'm not too fussed about other big swing cards. It would be an optimisation to remove them, sure, but then someone at their end has to spend time making largely arbitrary decisions and coding it all in. Maybe it's as easy as copying and pasting lists over from Arena, but given Iksar has said they don't really understand how that stuff was managed before the guy doing it left, I somewhat doubt it. Besides, 8+ mana cards still leave time for the conversations to occur, so they don't really mess with the Brawl's premise.
I guess they made the decks random so the best choice of hero power changes, thereby encouraging players to switch it up and encounter all the different conversations. Random decks always have some volatility, but given the central purpose of the Brawl that is probably out-weighed by the removal of an optimal choice.
They already had Warmaster Voone who, while not a dragon himself, is arguably more dragon related than Brightwing is. Needless to say, dragons will really welcome getting 2 more mercs, even if Wrathion is another weird one for the tribe.
There's a lot more to Pandaria than just monks though. Even the Shado-Pan has a rogue as its effective second-in-command (Taoshi), so you can do more or less whatever you like in Pandaria without monks being a necessary addition. Ideally they'd be there, but I'm not sure that is worth waiting years more for.
Well, I have an old-school flip phone with online capabilities that would have made us cringe in the '90s. So for this context no, I don't have a phone :P
I did them a while ago, so my memory is a bit shaky, but a couple I remember quite clearly were:
Beating Snowclaw with Thrall's elite encounter Hex treasure. It has 5-turn cooldown, so he had to sit on the bench while my first 3 mercs stalled by not attacking (attacking Snowclaw would hurt them seriously). When 5 turns had passed I had someone die, brought Thrall out, turned Snowclaw into a 0/1 frog and had it easy from there.
I beat Icehowl using Valeera Sanguinar's treasure that makes her immune while she's stealthed. Then she just sat in the middle while Icehowl kept hitting the character in front of him (i.e. the immune Valeera). I guess you can bring Scabbs along too since Valeera will make him immune as well.
When all else fails, I've found a couple of ways that can cheese most (though not quite all) bosses:
Use King Mukla with his equipment that makes bananas give more health. Then try/hope to get the treasure for him that sets his starting health to 4 (or 6 if from an elite encounter) and he only takes 1 damage. You have to be careful he doesn't die on turn 1, so you might start him on the bench so his speed (3) taunt ability is ready when you first use him, but once he gets going he should gain health way faster than the opponents can deal damage.
Use Valeera Sanguinar and/or Scabbs Cutterbutter and try/hope to get their elite encounter "Assassinate 2" treasure that will destroy an enemy at the start of the encounter. If you're lucky you'll hit the boss itself and trivialise the fight, and even if you hit something else it often makes things A LOT easier.
Note that against Nefarian you actually want the non-elite "Assassinate 1" which only hits neutrals, and hence will guaranteed hit Nefarian himself. It's not much use against other bosses though, except Chromaggus who starts neutral, and only Valeera gets offered this I believe.
The downsides of these plans is they don't give you a big sense of accomplishment when you do them, and the Mukla approach especially can end up a tedious process where you only have Mukla left and you slowly punch the boss down. The big upside is they only require 1 merc, so you can bring them along with 5 other mercs who you build a proper plan around, when they provide a back-up plan.
It matters, but only up to a point. We Brits experience a lot of different accents, all pronouncing words a bit differently, but still generally understand what everyone means. That's exaggerated even more when you work with people from across the globe as I do. I'm not going to 'correct' people every time they pronounce something differently but I still understood what they meant. What would be the point? They successfully communicated what they wanted to communicate, which is all that really matters in the end.
In your pasties example getting the wrong sound for the 'a' matters because it changes the interpretation, but people will know exactly what you mean whichever of the 2 common pronunciations of gif you use. For all intents and purposes both pronunciations are correct since they both achieve the same thing (heck, they even both trigger people trying to be pedantic in favour of the other option :P). It's only a matter of time before 'gif' joins 'scone' as a word with 2 fully accepted pronunciations that people will argue over just for the fun of it.
Throwing my own hat into the ring, I take the stance that there is no single right way to pronounce "gif" (or any other word for that matter); any pronunciation that is understood in context is fine. There are far too many accents for there to be a 'correct' pronunciation of anything in English, and recent additions like gif are no exception. It doesn't matter what the person who invented it had in mind, because every word starts with a single pronunciation (since they start in the mind/vocalisation of a single person), but all evolve as they move through time and space.
Now, if you have a language that does enforce specific pronunciations then there is an argument to be made, but English ain't that language.
IIRC it sounded like they were finally considering going there without waiting to add monks. Either way Pandaria looks to be some way off still, but it might offer more hope for it appearing in 2023 than if we had to wait for the monk class.
It's a shame they put it off for so long. We went to Icecrown without any wait for a DK class, and Pandaria is probably more interesting in many ways since we see the scourge all over the place, while most things in Pandaria are unique to that land.
As much as I sympathise with you, non-golden cards generate non-golden things (in this case heroes), so it is working 'correctly'. My golden Maestra is dutifully giving me golden warrior, warlock and DH heroes despite me not having those classes at 500 wins yet.
On the whole I agree, though there are actually quite a few power-ups that are interesting and can change how you approach things. To name a few: Valeera's immune+heal while stealthed (especially when also using Scabbs); both VanCleefs get a power-up that let's you change their role; Cariel and Cornelius get some Roame family insurance with divine shield shenanigans; Cookie can pre-summon 2 fish.
I have used most characters fairly equally in PvE, and I'd estimate at least half the characters don't get offered anything particularly interesting, or it's only offered after an elite encounter so you'd rarely see them. Thrall getting Hex that way saved my bacon against heroic Snowclaw, for example, but I've only ever seen Thrall offered it once so I have no idea how many mercs have something interesting hidden there that I've just never seen. The more interesting characters thus end up being those who see the cool things after normal encounters, e.g. Valeera and the VanCleefs.
So yeah, there's definitely room for improvement there and I hope they revisit what everyone is offered and replace useless/boring options (like casting a random ability twice at speed 8, which is a complete liability on all the mercs who have targeted, non-attacking abilities) with something that changes how you approach the gameplay.
It is worth pointing out though that there is a lot of variety embedded in the comp and equipment choice, and unless you're doing a high-level heroic bounty it probably won't cripple you to use something sub-optimal. Even if you are doing a high-level heroic bounty, you can sometimes cheese them with things like Valeera's Assassinate treasure or Mukla only taking 1 damage at a time (with which you can easily eat lots of bananas to make yourself unkillable), so most of the comp can be whatever you want to try out. You sometimes don't need to cheese it, but you have that as a back-up plan.
PS: can you not change equipment mid-bounty? It has certainly been letting me do that. I haven't been trying to exploit it, I just sometimes forgot to change before starting the bounty.
Do we really want him back when his entire thing, both in game and in meme is charge? We already have Mr Smite bringing the spirit of Leeroy to Standard. By the looks of it we have the 10 (probably 9 non-evil) mercs making up the raiding party, so I assume Leeroy isn't there anyway.
On the one hand I fully understand how we ended up here. On the other hand, Onyxia's lair is a long long way from Alterac Valley and the pedant inside me is pained by these cards officially being part of the AV set. I guess I'll just have to ignore the pedant and be happy to see dragons again; they always push decks in a direction I approve of.
The meme answer is that after all these years people are still discovering the secrets of Pot of Greed and don't fully understand it yet, much less its synergy cards.
For a proper answer I have to disclose my knowledge of YuGiOh is about 15 years out of date, so I really have no idea. But I do recall there were a few cards that were treated as cards of other names, e.g. A Legendary Ocean wasn't Umi, but stated 'This card's name is always treated as "Umi"'. Maybe there is something similar with PoG? I.e. an actually balanced version that is treated as PoG for synergy purposes?
If not, then maybe they just wanted to print cards referencing PoG because of its special place in the history of the game, but only made them for use in casual settings where players can make their own ban lists.
I only have a surface level knowledge of the Three Kingdoms story, but I get the feeling wearing Maiev's helmet might have made things more difficult for Diao Chan :P Besides, Maiev was a (presumably helmet-less) priestess of Elune back in the War of the Ancients, so there's good basis for her look here.
For story I'd also pick Rise of Shadows. The Year of the Dragon was the pinnacle of Hearthstone embracing its own identity, both mechanically and thematically, and RoS was the best of the 3 for me.
It also helps that over the pandemic I have been playing as Togwaggle in a D&D campaign, and we just rounded things off by rescuing - then stealing! - a flying city. We weren't even aiming to mimic the Dalaran Heist, it just ended up that way, and it's beautiful :D
For songs, I'm probably going to lose a few points for this, but I've never liked SoU's song. I appreciate why people would like it, but it's not my kind of thing. I like Witchwood's, though it took a while to grow on me. For my favourite, I'll go for WotOG, with TGT and RR being my honourable mentions. If we expand the search to all trailers, then K&C's "The Light Candle" trailer and the Dalaran Heist trailers need a shout out. (Basically anything with Togwaggle in it is an instant winner :P)
They did at least make most of them have some form of weakness to the appropriate merc. That's not really the case for Sinestra or Lokholar (heck, I got Lok'holar's elite treasure to freeze all enemies for the first turn, which was great until I realised the final boss can't be frozen...), but Wrathion's final boss has a human weakness, you fight fire with fire (or rather bleed with bleed) with Galvangar, and Drek'thar kindly provides both fire and frost damage buffs for whatever you plan to do with Balinda.
So while it made it more difficult, it wasn't poorly designed.
Sigh. I had been considering dabbling in Wild again. Pre-Stormwind I played it more than Standard, but barely touched it since.
No matter how you swing it, getting your board permanently frozen is never fun. I'm honestly amazed they gave Shaman the potential for so much AoE freezing after that was the entire cause of frustration against Freeze Mage, and the very thing they told us they wanted to avoid when making Freeze Shaman back in KotFT. It's almost like they knew what they were doing when they made it meme-tier weak...
Keeping hero cards was a definite oversight given the circumstances, though I'm not too fussed about other big swing cards. It would be an optimisation to remove them, sure, but then someone at their end has to spend time making largely arbitrary decisions and coding it all in. Maybe it's as easy as copying and pasting lists over from Arena, but given Iksar has said they don't really understand how that stuff was managed before the guy doing it left, I somewhat doubt it. Besides, 8+ mana cards still leave time for the conversations to occur, so they don't really mess with the Brawl's premise.
I guess they made the decks random so the best choice of hero power changes, thereby encouraging players to switch it up and encounter all the different conversations. Random decks always have some volatility, but given the central purpose of the Brawl that is probably out-weighed by the removal of an optimal choice.
I think it's more to do with the Stormwind mount spells, of which 2 appear here, than any foreshadowing.
They already had Warmaster Voone who, while not a dragon himself, is arguably more dragon related than Brightwing is. Needless to say, dragons will really welcome getting 2 more mercs, even if Wrathion is another weird one for the tribe.
There's a lot more to Pandaria than just monks though. Even the Shado-Pan has a rogue as its effective second-in-command (Taoshi), so you can do more or less whatever you like in Pandaria without monks being a necessary addition. Ideally they'd be there, but I'm not sure that is worth waiting years more for.
The question is, will he be classified as a human or a demon?
Well, I have an old-school flip phone with online capabilities that would have made us cringe in the '90s. So for this context no, I don't have a phone :P
I did them a while ago, so my memory is a bit shaky, but a couple I remember quite clearly were:
When all else fails, I've found a couple of ways that can cheese most (though not quite all) bosses:
The downsides of these plans is they don't give you a big sense of accomplishment when you do them, and the Mukla approach especially can end up a tedious process where you only have Mukla left and you slowly punch the boss down. The big upside is they only require 1 merc, so you can bring them along with 5 other mercs who you build a proper plan around, when they provide a back-up plan.
It matters, but only up to a point. We Brits experience a lot of different accents, all pronouncing words a bit differently, but still generally understand what everyone means. That's exaggerated even more when you work with people from across the globe as I do. I'm not going to 'correct' people every time they pronounce something differently but I still understood what they meant. What would be the point? They successfully communicated what they wanted to communicate, which is all that really matters in the end.
In your pasties example getting the wrong sound for the 'a' matters because it changes the interpretation, but people will know exactly what you mean whichever of the 2 common pronunciations of gif you use. For all intents and purposes both pronunciations are correct since they both achieve the same thing (heck, they even both trigger people trying to be pedantic in favour of the other option :P). It's only a matter of time before 'gif' joins 'scone' as a word with 2 fully accepted pronunciations that people will argue over just for the fun of it.
Throwing my own hat into the ring, I take the stance that there is no single right way to pronounce "gif" (or any other word for that matter); any pronunciation that is understood in context is fine. There are far too many accents for there to be a 'correct' pronunciation of anything in English, and recent additions like gif are no exception. It doesn't matter what the person who invented it had in mind, because every word starts with a single pronunciation (since they start in the mind/vocalisation of a single person), but all evolve as they move through time and space.
Now, if you have a language that does enforce specific pronunciations then there is an argument to be made, but English ain't that language.
IIRC it sounded like they were finally considering going there without waiting to add monks. Either way Pandaria looks to be some way off still, but it might offer more hope for it appearing in 2023 than if we had to wait for the monk class.
It's a shame they put it off for so long. We went to Icecrown without any wait for a DK class, and Pandaria is probably more interesting in many ways since we see the scourge all over the place, while most things in Pandaria are unique to that land.
As much as I sympathise with you, non-golden cards generate non-golden things (in this case heroes), so it is working 'correctly'. My golden Maestra is dutifully giving me golden warrior, warlock and DH heroes despite me not having those classes at 500 wins yet.
On the whole I agree, though there are actually quite a few power-ups that are interesting and can change how you approach things. To name a few: Valeera's immune+heal while stealthed (especially when also using Scabbs); both VanCleefs get a power-up that let's you change their role; Cariel and Cornelius get some Roame family insurance with divine shield shenanigans; Cookie can pre-summon 2 fish.
I have used most characters fairly equally in PvE, and I'd estimate at least half the characters don't get offered anything particularly interesting, or it's only offered after an elite encounter so you'd rarely see them. Thrall getting Hex that way saved my bacon against heroic Snowclaw, for example, but I've only ever seen Thrall offered it once so I have no idea how many mercs have something interesting hidden there that I've just never seen. The more interesting characters thus end up being those who see the cool things after normal encounters, e.g. Valeera and the VanCleefs.
So yeah, there's definitely room for improvement there and I hope they revisit what everyone is offered and replace useless/boring options (like casting a random ability twice at speed 8, which is a complete liability on all the mercs who have targeted, non-attacking abilities) with something that changes how you approach the gameplay.
It is worth pointing out though that there is a lot of variety embedded in the comp and equipment choice, and unless you're doing a high-level heroic bounty it probably won't cripple you to use something sub-optimal. Even if you are doing a high-level heroic bounty, you can sometimes cheese them with things like Valeera's Assassinate treasure or Mukla only taking 1 damage at a time (with which you can easily eat lots of bananas to make yourself unkillable), so most of the comp can be whatever you want to try out. You sometimes don't need to cheese it, but you have that as a back-up plan.
PS: can you not change equipment mid-bounty? It has certainly been letting me do that. I haven't been trying to exploit it, I just sometimes forgot to change before starting the bounty.